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• Find More Streaming TV Online with Clicker.tv

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Looking for a way to access more of your favorite TV Shows and other online entertainment? Today we’ll take a look at Clicker.tv which offers an awesome way to find tons of TV programs and movies. Clicker.tv Clicker.tv is an HTML5 web application that indexes both free and premium content from sources like Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and more. Some movies or episodes, such as those from Netflix and Amazon.com’s Video on Demand, will require viewers to have a membership, or pay a fee to access content. There is also a Clicker.tv app for Boxee.   Navigation Navigating in Clicker.tv is rather easy with your keyboard. Directional Keys: navigate up, down, left, and right. Enter: make a selection Backspace: return to previous screen Escape: return to the Clicker.tv home screen. Note: You can also navigate through Clicker.tv with your PC remote. Recommended Browsers Firefox 3.6 + Safari 4.0 + Internet Explorer 8 + Google Chrome Note: You’ll need the latest version of Flash installed to play the majority of content. Earlier versions of the above browsers may work, but for full keyboard functionality, stick with the recommendations. Using Clicker.tv The first time you go to Clicker.tv, (link below) you’ll be met with a welcome screen and some helpful hints. Click Enter when finished.   The Home screen feature Headliners, Trending Shows, and Trending Episodes. You can scroll through the different options and category links along the left side.   The Search link pulls up an onscreen keyboard so you can enter search terms with a remote as well as a keyboard. Type in your search terms and matching items are displayed on the screen.   You can also browse by a wide variety of categories. Select TV to browse only available TV programs. Or, browse only Movies in the movie category. There are also links for Web content and Music.   Creating an Account You can access all Clicker.tv content without an account, but a Clicker account allows users to create playlists and subscribe to shows and have them automatically added to their playlist. You’ll need to go to Clicker.com and create an account. You’ll find the link at the upper right of the page. Enter a username, password and email address. There also an option to link with Facebook, or you can simply Skip this step.   Go to Clicker.tv and sign in. You can manually type in your credentials or use the onscreen keyboard with your remote.   Settings If you’d prefer not to display content from premium sites or Netflix, you can remove them through the Settings. Toggle Amazon, iTunes and Netflix on or off.   Watching Episodes To watch an episode, select the image to begin playing from the default source, or select one of the other options. You can see in the example below that you can choose to watch the episode from Fox, Hulu, or Amazon Video on Demand.   Your episode will then launch and begin playing from your chosen source. If you choose a premium content source such as iTunes or Amazon’s VOD, you’ll be taken to the Amazon’s website or iTunes and prompted to purchase the content.   Playlists Once you’ve created an account and signed in, you can begin adding Shows to your playlist. Choose a series and select Add to Playlist.   You’ll see in the example below that Family Guy has been Added and the number 142 is shown next to the playlist icon to indicate that 142 episodes has been added to your playlist. Underneath the listings for each episode in your playlist you can mark as Watched, or Remove individual episodes.   You can also view the playlist or make any changes from the Clicker.com website. Click on “Playlist” on the top right of the Clicker.com site to access your playlists. You can select individual episodes from your playlists, remove them, or mark them as watched or unwatched. Clicker.TV and Boxee Boxee offers a Clicker.TV app that features a limited amount of the Clicker.TV content. You’ll find Clicker.TV located in the Boxee Apps Library. Select the Clicker App and then choose Start. From the Clicker App interface you can search or browse for available content. Select an episode you’d like to view… Then select play in the pop up window. You can also add it to your Boxee queue, share it, or add a shortcut, just as you can from other Boxee apps. When you click play your episode will launch and begin playing in Boxee. Conclusion Clicker.TV is currently still in Beta and has some limitations. Typical remotes won’t work completely in all external websites. So, you’ll still need a keyboard to be able to perform some operations such as switching to full screen mode. The Boxee app offers a more fully remote friendly environment, but unfortunately lacks a good portion of the Clicker.tv content. As with many content sites, availability of certain programming may be limited by your geographic location. Want to add Clicker.TV functionality to Windows Media Center? You can do so through the Boxee Integration for Windows 7 Media Center plug-in. Clicker.tv Clicker.com Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Share Digital Media With Other Computers on a Home Network with Windows 7Stream Music and Video Over the Internet with Windows Media Player 12Listen to Online Radio with AntennaEnable Media Streaming in Windows Home Server to Windows Media PlayerNorton Internet Security 2010 [Review] TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Nice Websites To Watch TV Shows Online 24 Million Sites Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like) How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos

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• Michael Crump&rsquo;s notes for 70-563 PRO &ndash; Designing and Developing Windows Applications usi

  - by mbcrump

  TIME TO GO PRO! This is my notes for 70-563 PRO – Designing and Developing Windows Applications using .NET Framework 3.5 I created it using several resources (various certification web sites, msdn, official ms 70-548 book). The reason that I created this review is because a) I am taking the exam. b) MS did not create a book for this exam. Use the(MS 70-548)book. c) To make sure I am familiar with each before the exam. I hope that it provides a good start for your own notes. I hope that someone finds this useful. At least, it will give you a starting point of what to expect to know on the PRO exam. Also, for those wondering, the PRO exam does contains very little code. It is basically all theory. 1. Validation Controls – How to prevent users from entering invalid data on forms. (MaskedTextBox control and RegEx) 2. ServiceController – used to start and control the behavior of existing services. 3. User Feedback (know winforms Status Bar, Tool Tips, Color, Error Provider, Context-Sensitive and Accessibility) 4. Specific (derived) exceptions must be handled before general (base class) exceptions. By moving the exception handling for the base type Exception to after exception handling of ArgumentNullException, all ArgumentNullException thrown by the Helper method will be caught and logged correctly. 5. A heartbeat method is a method exposed by a Web service that allows external applications to check on the status of the service. 6. New users must master key tasks quickly. Giving these tasks context and appropriate detail will help. However, advanced users will demand quicker paths. Shortcuts, accelerators, or toolbar buttons will speed things along for the advanced user. 7. MSBuild uses project files to instruct the build engine what to build and how to build it. MSBuild project files are XML files that adhere to the MSBuild XML schema. The MSBuild project files contain complete file, build action, and dependency information for each individual projects. 8. Evaluating whether or not to fix a bug involves a triage process. You must identify the bug's impact, set the priority, categorize it, and assign a developer. Many times the person doing the triage work will assign the bug to a developer for further investigation. In fact, the workflow for the bug work item inside of Team System supports this step. Developers are often asked to assess the impact of a given bug. This assessment helps the person doing the triage make a decision on how to proceed. When assessing the impact of a bug, you should consider time and resources to fix it, bug risk, and impacts of the bug. 9. In large projects it is generally impossible and unfeasible to fix all bugs because of the impact on schedule and budget. 10. Code reviews should be conducted by a technical lead or a technical peer. 11. Testing Applications 12. WCF Services – application state 13. SQL Server 2005 / 2008 Express Edition – reliable storage of data / Microsoft SQL Server 3.5 Compact Database– used for client computers to retrieve and save data from a shared location. 14. SQL Server 2008 Compact Edition – used for minimum possible memory and can synchronize data with a corporate SQL Server 2008 Database. Supports offline user and minimum dependency on external components. 15. MDI and SDI Forms (specifically IsMDIContainer) 16. GUID – in the case of data warehousing, it is important to define unique keys. 17. Encrypting / Security Data 18. Understanding of Isolated Storage/Proper location to store items 19. LINQ to SQL 20. Multithreaded access 21. ADO.NET Entity Framework model 22. Marshal.ReleaseComObject 23. Common User Interface Layout (ComboBox, ListBox, Listview, MaskedTextBox, TextBox, RichTextBox, SplitContainer, TableLayoutPanel, TabControl) 24. DataSets Class - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.dataset%28VS.71%29.aspx 25. SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services (SSRS) 26. SystemIcons.Shield (Vista UAC) 27. Leverging stored procedures to perform data manipulation for a database schema that can change. 28. DataContext 29. Microsoft Windows Installer Packages, ClickOnce(bootstrapping features), XCopy. 30. Client Application Services – will authenticate users by using the same data source as a ASP.NET web application. 31. SQL Server 2008 Caching 32. StringBuilder 33. Accessibility Guidelines for Windows Applications http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228004.aspx 34. Logging erros 35. Testing performance related issues. 36. Role Based Security, GenericIdentity and GenericPrincipal 37. System.Net.CookieContainer will store session data for webapps (see isolated storage for winforms) 38. .NET CLR Profiler tool will identify objects that cause performance issues. 39. ADO.NET Synchronization (SyncGroup) 40. Globalization - CultureInfo 41. IDisposable Interface- reports on several questions relating to this. 42. Adding timestamps to determine whether data has changed or not. 43. Converting applications to .NET Framework 3.5 44. MicrosoftReportViewer 45. Composite Controls 46. Windows Vista KNOWN folders. 47. Microsoft Sync Framework 48. TypeConverter -Provides a unified way of converting types of values to other types, as well as for accessing standard values and sub properties. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.componentmodel.typeconverter.aspx 49. Concurrency control mechanisms The main categories of concurrency control mechanisms are: Optimistic - Delay the checking of whether a transaction meets the isolation rules (e.g., serializability and recoverability) until its end, without blocking any of its (read, write) operations, and then abort a transaction, if the desired rules are violated. Pessimistic - Block operations of a transaction, if they may cause violation of the rules. Semi-optimistic - Block operations in some situations, and do not block in other situations, while delaying rules checking to transaction's end, as done with optimistic. 50. AutoResetEvent 51. Microsoft Messaging Queue (MSMQ) 4.0 52. Bulk imports 53. KeyDown event of controls 54. WPF UI components 55. UI process layer 56. GAC (installing, removing and queuing) 57. Use a local database cache to reduce the network bandwidth used by applications. 58. Sound can easily be annoying and distracting to users, so use it judiciously. Always give users the option to turn sound off. Because a user might have sound off, never convey important information through sound alone.

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• Dynamic Types and DynamicObject References in C#

  - by Rick Strahl

  I've been working a bit with C# custom dynamic types for several customers recently and I've seen some confusion in understanding how dynamic types are referenced. This discussion specifically centers around types that implement IDynamicMetaObjectProvider or subclass from DynamicObject as opposed to arbitrary type casts of standard .NET types. IDynamicMetaObjectProvider types  are treated special when they are cast to the dynamic type. Assume for a second that I've created my own implementation of a custom dynamic type called DynamicFoo which is about as simple of a dynamic class that I can think of:public class DynamicFoo : DynamicObject { Dictionary<string, object> properties = new Dictionary<string, object>(); public string Bar { get; set; } public DateTime Entered { get; set; } public override bool TryGetMember(GetMemberBinder binder, out object result) { result = null; if (!properties.ContainsKey(binder.Name)) return false; result = properties[binder.Name]; return true; } public override bool TrySetMember(SetMemberBinder binder, object value) { properties[binder.Name] = value; return true; } } This class has an internal dictionary member and I'm exposing this dictionary member through a dynamic by implementing DynamicObject. This implementation exposes the properties dictionary so the dictionary keys can be referenced like properties (foo.NewProperty = "Cool!"). I override TryGetMember() and TrySetMember() which are fired at runtime every time you access a 'property' on a dynamic instance of this DynamicFoo type. Strong Typing and Dynamic Casting I now can instantiate and use DynamicFoo in a couple of different ways: Strong TypingDynamicFoo fooExplicit = new DynamicFoo(); var fooVar = new DynamicFoo(); These two commands are essentially identical and use strong typing. The compiler generates identical code for both of them. The var statement is merely a compiler directive to infer the type of fooVar at compile time and so the type of fooExplicit is DynamicFoo, just like fooExplicit. This is very static - nothing dynamic about it - and it completely ignores the IDynamicMetaObjectProvider implementation of my class above as it's never used. Using either of these I can access the native properties:DynamicFoo fooExplicit = new DynamicFoo();// static typing assignmentsfooVar.Bar = "Barred!"; fooExplicit.Entered = DateTime.Now; // echo back static values Console.WriteLine(fooVar.Bar); Console.WriteLine(fooExplicit.Entered); but I have no access whatsoever to the properties dictionary. Basically this creates a strongly typed instance of the type with access only to the strongly typed interface. You get no dynamic behavior at all. The IDynamicMetaObjectProvider features don't kick in until you cast the type to dynamic. If I try to access a non-existing property on fooExplicit I get a compilation error that tells me that the property doesn't exist. Again, it's clearly and utterly non-dynamic. Dynamicdynamic fooDynamic = new DynamicFoo(); fooDynamic on the other hand is created as a dynamic type and it's a completely different beast. I can also create a dynamic by simply casting any type to dynamic like this:DynamicFoo fooExplicit = new DynamicFoo(); dynamic fooDynamic = fooExplicit; Note that dynamic typically doesn't require an explicit cast as the compiler automatically performs the cast so there's no need to use as dynamic. Dynamic functionality works at runtime and allows for the dynamic wrapper to look up and call members dynamically. A dynamic type will look for members to access or call in two places: Using the strongly typed members of the object Using theIDynamicMetaObjectProvider Interface methods to access members So rather than statically linking and calling a method or retrieving a property, the dynamic type looks up - at runtime  - where the value actually comes from. It's essentially late-binding which allows runtime determination what action to take when a member is accessed at runtime *if* the member you are accessing does not exist on the object. Class members are checked first before IDynamicMetaObjectProvider interface methods are kick in. All of the following works with the dynamic type:dynamic fooDynamic = new DynamicFoo(); // dynamic typing assignments fooDynamic.NewProperty = "Something new!"; fooDynamic.LastAccess = DateTime.Now; // dynamic assigning static properties fooDynamic.Bar = "dynamic barred"; fooDynamic.Entered = DateTime.Now; // echo back dynamic values Console.WriteLine(fooDynamic.NewProperty); Console.WriteLine(fooDynamic.LastAccess); Console.WriteLine(fooDynamic.Bar); Console.WriteLine(fooDynamic.Entered); The dynamic type can access the native class properties (Bar and Entered) and create and read new ones (NewProperty,LastAccess) all using a single type instance which is pretty cool. As you can see it's pretty easy to create an extensible type this way that can dynamically add members at runtime dynamically. The Alter Ego of IDynamicObject The key point here is that all three statements - explicit, var and dynamic - declare a new DynamicFoo(), but the dynamic declaration results in completely different behavior than the first two simply because the type has been cast to dynamic. Dynamic binding means that the type loses its typical strong typing, compile time features. You can see this easily in the Visual Studio code editor. As soon as you assign a value to a dynamic you lose Intellisense and you see which means there's no Intellisense and no compiler type checking on any members you apply to this instance. If you're new to the dynamic type it might seem really confusing that a single type can behave differently depending on how it is cast, but that's exactly what happens when you use a type that implements IDynamicMetaObjectProvider. Declare the type as its strong type name and you only get to access the native instance members of the type. Declare or cast it to dynamic and you get dynamic behavior which accesses native members plus it uses IDynamicMetaObjectProvider implementation to handle any missing member definitions by running custom code. You can easily cast objects back and forth between dynamic and the original type:dynamic fooDynamic = new DynamicFoo(); fooDynamic.NewProperty = "New Property Value"; DynamicFoo foo = fooDynamic; foo.Bar = "Barred"; Here the code starts out with a dynamic cast and a dynamic assignment. The code then casts back the value to the DynamicFoo. Notice that when casting from dynamic to DynamicFoo and back we typically do not have to specify the cast explicitly - the compiler can induce the type so I don't need to specify as dynamic or as DynamicFoo. Moral of the Story This easy interchange between dynamic and the underlying type is actually super useful, because it allows you to create extensible objects that can expose non-member data stores and expose them as an object interface. You can create an object that hosts a number of strongly typed properties and then cast the object to dynamic and add additional dynamic properties to the same type at runtime. You can easily switch back and forth between the strongly typed instance to access the well-known strongly typed properties and to dynamic for the dynamic properties added at runtime. Keep in mind that dynamic object access has quite a bit of overhead and is definitely slower than strongly typed binding, so if you're accessing the strongly typed parts of your objects you definitely want to use a strongly typed reference. Reserve dynamic for the dynamic members to optimize your code. The real beauty of dynamic is that with very little effort you can build expandable objects or objects that expose different data stores to an object interface. I'll have more on this in my next post when I create a customized and extensible Expando object based on DynamicObject.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in CSharp  .NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g: Creating your first sealed document

  - by Simon Thorpe

  Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g indexThe previous articles in this guide have detailed how to install, configure and secure your Oracle IRM 11g service. This article walks you through the process of now creating your first context and securing a document against it. I should mention that it would be worth reviewing the following to ensure your installation is ready for that all important first document. Ensure you have correctly configured the keystore for the IRM wrapper keys. If this is not correctly configured, creating the context below will fail. Make sure the IRM server URL correctly resolves and uses the right protocol (HTTP or HTTPS) ContentsCreate the first contextInstall the Oracle IRM Desktop Seal your first document Create the first contextIn Oracle 11g there is a built in classification and rights system called the "standard rights model" which is based on 10 years of customer use cases and innovation. It is a system which enables IRM to scale massively whilst retaining the ability to balance security and usability and also separate duties by allowing contacts in the business to own classifications. The final article in this guide goes into detail on this inbuilt classification model, but for the purposes of this current article all we need to do is create at least one context to test our system out.With a new IRM server there are a set of predefined context templates and roles which again are setup in a way which reflects the most common use we've learned from our customers. We will use these out of the box configurations as they are to create the first context against which we will seal some content.First login to your Oracle IRM Management Website located at https://irm.company.com/irm_rights/. Currently the system is only configured to use the built in LDAP for users, so use the only account we have at the moment, which by default is weblogic. Once logged in switch to the Contexts tab. Click on the New Context icon () in the menu bar on the left. In the resulting dialog select the Standard context template and enter in a name for the context. Then just hit finish, the weblogic account will automatically be made the manager. You'll now see your brand new context ready for users to be assigned. Now click on the Assign Role icon () in the menu bar and in the resulting dialog search for your only user account, weblogic, and add to the list on the right. Now select a role for this user. Because we need to create a document with this user we must select contributor, as this is the only role which allows for the ability to seal. Finally hit next and then finish. We now have a context with a user that has the rights to create a document. The next step is to configure the IRM Desktop to get these rights from the server. Install the Oracle IRM Desktop Before we can seal a document we need the client software installed. Oracle IRM has a very small, lightweight client called the Oracle IRM Desktop which can be freely downloaded in 27 languages from here. Double click on the installer and click on next... Next again... And finally on install... Very easy. You may get a warning about closing Outlook, Word or another application and most of the time no reboots are required. Once it is installed you will see the IRM Desktop icon running in your tool tray, bottom right of the desktop. Seal your first document Finally the prize is within reach, creating your first sealed document. The server is running, we've got a context ready, a user assigned a role in the context but there is the simple and obvious hoop left to jump through. To seal a document we need to have the users rights cached to the local machine. For this to take place, the IRM Desktop needs to know where the Oracle IRM server is on the network so we can synchronize these rights and then be able to seal a document. The usual way for the IRM Desktop to know about the IRM server is it learns automatically when you open an existing piece of content that someone has sent you... ack. Bit of a chicken or the egg dilemma. The solution is to manually tell the IRM Desktop the location of the IRM Server and then force a synchronization of rights. Right click on the Oracle IRM Desktop icon in the system tray and select Options.... Then switch to the Servers tab in the resulting dialog. There are no servers in the list because you've never opened any content. This list is usually populated automatically but we are going to add a server manually, so click on New.... Into the dialog enter in the full URL to the IRM server. Note that this time you use the path /irm_desktop/ and not /irm_rights/. You can see an example from the image below. Click on the validate button and you'll be asked to authenticate. Enter in your weblogic username and password and also check the Remember my password check box. Click OK and the IRM Desktop will confirm a successful connection to the server. OK all the dialogs and we are ready to Synchronize this users rights to the desktop. Right click once more on the Oracle IRM Desktop icon in the system tray. Now the Synchronize menu option is available. Select this and the IRM Desktop will now talk to the IRM server, authenticate using your weblogic account and get your rights to the context we created. Because this is the first time this users has communicated with the IRM server the IRM Desktop presents a privacy policy dialog. This is a chance for the business to ask users to agree to any policy about the use of IRM before opening secured documents. In our guide we've not bothered to setup this URL so just click on the check box and hit Accept. The IRM Desktop will then talk to the server, get your rights and display a success dialog. Lets protect a documentNow we are ready to seal a piece of content. In my guide i'm going to protect a Microsoft Word document. This mean's I have to have copy of Office installed, in this guide i'm using Microsoft Office 2007. You could also seal a PDF document, you'll need to download and install Adobe Acrobat Reader. A very simple test could be to seal a GIF/JPG/PNG or piece of HTML because this is rendered using Internet Explorer. But as I say, i'm going to protect a Word document. The following example demonstrates choosing a file in Windows Explorer, there are many ways to seal a file and you can watch a few in this video.Open a copy of Windows Explorer and locate the file you wish to seal. Right click on the document and select Seal To -> Context You are now presented with the Select Context dialog. You'll now have a sealed copy of the document sat in the same location. Double click on this document and it will open, again using the credentials you've already provided. That is it, now you just need to add more users, more documents, more classifications and start exploring the different roles and experiment with different offline periods etc. You may wish to setup the server against an existing LDAP or Active Directory environment instead of using the built in WebLogic LDAP store. You can read how to use your corporate directory here. But before we finish this guide, there is one more article and arguably the most important article of all. Next I discuss the all important decision making surrounding the actually implementation of Oracle IRM inside your business. Who has rights to what? How do you map contexts to your existing business practices? It is the next article which actually ensures you deploy a successful IRM solution by looking at the business and understanding how they use your sensitive information and then configuring Oracle IRM to reflect their use.

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• Package Dependencies Error in almost every install

  - by Betaxpression

  New to Ubuntu. In the other sofware sources i have "Debian 4.0 eth" officially supported "non-us.debian.org/"; etc ... "ppa.launcpad.net" and installing applications has stopped working. I think i first came across this problem after installing Blender 2.58 When using update manager it is prompting for a partial upgrade. Almost every software when trying to install showing the same error Package Dependencies Error or GPG PUB KEY missing, tried to fixing to them but no luck. Output to: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade (links disabled http:// -- http:/ as new user can't put more no. of hyperlinks) Ign http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US InRelease Ign http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US Release.gpg Ign http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US Release Ign http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US/contrib TranslationIndex Ign http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US/main TranslationIndex Ign http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US/non-free TranslationIndex Err http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US/main Sources 503 Service Unavailable Err http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US/contrib Sources 503 Service Unavailable Err http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US/non-free Sources 503 Service Unavailable Err http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US/main amd64 Packages 503 Service Unavailable Err http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US/contrib amd64 Packages 503 Service Unavailable Err http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US/non-free amd64 Packages 503 Service Unavailable Ign http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US/contrib Translation-en_IN Ign http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US/contrib Translation-en Ign http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US/main Translation-en_IN Ign http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US/main Translation-en Ign http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US/non-free Translation-en_IN Ign http:/non-us.debian.org stable/non-US/non-free Translation-en Ign http:/archive.ubuntu.com natty InRelease Ign http:/archive.canonical.com natty InRelease Ign http:/extras.ubuntu.com natty InRelease Ign http:/http.us.debian.org stable InRelease Ign http:/ftp.us.debian.org etch InRelease Ign http:/archive.ubuntu.com natty-updates InRelease Hit http:/archive.canonical.com natty Release.gpg Get:1 http:/extras.ubuntu.com natty Release.gpg [72 B] Ign http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty InRelease Get:2 http:/http.us.debian.org stable Release.gpg [1,672 B] Ign http:/linux.dropbox.com natty InRelease Ign http:/ftp.us.debian.org etch Release.gpg Ign http:/archive.ubuntu.com natty-security InRelease Hit http:/archive.canonical.com natty Release Hit http:/extras.ubuntu.com natty Release Ign http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty InRelease Get:3 http:/linux.dropbox.com natty Release.gpg [489 B] Ign http:/ftp.us.debian.org etch Release Ign http:/dl.google.com stable InRelease Get:4 http:/archive.ubuntu.com natty Release.gpg [198 B] Ign http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty InRelease Hit http:/archive.canonical.com natty/partner Sources Hit http:/extras.ubuntu.com natty/main Sources Get:5 http:/linux.dropbox.com natty Release [2,599 B] Get:6 http:/archive.ubuntu.com natty-updates Release.gpg [198 B] Ign http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty InRelease Hit http:/archive.canonical.com natty/partner amd64 Packages Hit http:/extras.ubuntu.com natty/main amd64 Packages Get:7 http:/linux.dropbox.com natty/main amd64 Packages [784 B] Get:8 http:/archive.ubuntu.com natty-security Release.gpg [198 B] Ign http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty InRelease Ign http:/archive.canonical.com natty/partner TranslationIndex Ign http:/extras.ubuntu.com natty/main TranslationIndex Get:9 http:/http.us.debian.org stable Release [104 kB] Ign http:/linux.dropbox.com natty/main TranslationIndex Hit http:/archive.ubuntu.com natty Release Ign http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty InRelease Ign http:/http.us.debian.org stable Release Hit http:/archive.ubuntu.com natty-updates Release Get:10 http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty InRelease [316 B] Ign http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty InRelease Hit http:/archive.ubuntu.com natty-security Release Get:11 http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty InRelease [316 B] Ign http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty InRelease Hit http:/archive.ubuntu.com natty/restricted Sources Get:12 http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty Release.gpg [316 B] Ign http:/http.us.debian.org stable/main Sources/DiffIndex Get:13 http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty Release.gpg [316 B] Hit http:/archive.ubuntu.com natty/main Sources Ign http:/ftp.us.debian.org etch/contrib TranslationIndex Ign http:/http.us.debian.org stable/contrib Sources/DiffIndex Get:14 http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty Release.gpg [1,502 B] Ign http:/http.us.debian.org stable/non-free Sources/DiffIndex Ign http:/ftp.us.debian.org etch/main TranslationIndex Get:15 http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty Release.gpg [1,928 B] Ign http:/http.us.debian.org stable/main amd64 Packages/DiffIndex Ign http:/ftp.us.debian.org etch/non-free TranslationIndex Ign http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty Release.gpg Hit http:/http.us.debian.org stable/contrib amd64 Packages/DiffIndex W: GPG error: http:/http.us.debian.org stable Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY AED4B06F473041FA NO_PUBKEY 64481591B98321F9 W: GPG error: http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty InRelease: File /var/lib/apt/lists/partial/ppa.launchpad.net_sunab_kdenlive-release_ubuntu_dists_natty_InRelease doesn't start with a clearsigned message W: GPG error: http:/ppa.launchpad.net natty InRelease: File /var/lib/apt/lists/partial/ppa.launchpad.net_ubuntu-wine_ppa_ubuntu_dists_natty_InRelease doesn't start with a clearsigned message E: Could not open file /var/lib/apt/lists/http.us.debian.org_debian_dists_stable_contrib_binary-amd64_Packages.IndexDiff - open (2: No such file or directory) output to: sudo cat /etc/apt/sources.list # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 11.04 _Natty Narwhal_ - Release amd64 (20110427.1)]/ natty main restricted # See http:/help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http:/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty main restricted deb-src http:/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty restricted main multiverse universe #Added by software-properties ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http:/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty-updates main restricted deb-src http:/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty-updates restricted main multiverse universe #Added by software-properties ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http:/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty universe deb http:/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty-updates universe ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http:/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty multiverse deb http:/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty-updates multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'backports' ## repository. ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. # deb http:/us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty-backports main restricted universe multiverse # deb-src http:/us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty-backports main restricted universe multiverse deb http:/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty-security main restricted deb-src http:/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty-security restricted main multiverse universe #Added by software-properties deb http:/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty-security universe deb http:/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty-security multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users. deb http:/archive.canonical.com/ubuntu natty partner deb-src http:/archive.canonical.com/ubuntu natty partner ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party ## developers who want to ship their latest software. deb http:/extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty main deb-src http:/extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu natty main deb http:/ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free deb-src http:/ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free deb http:/http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free deb-src http:/http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free deb http:/non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free deb-src http:/non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free Thanks But after removing Debian repositories still getting this error: W:GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net natty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 9BDB3D89CE49EC21, W:GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net natty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 80E7349A06ED541C, W:GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net natty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 8C851674F96FD737, W:GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net natty Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 94E58C34A8670E8C, E:Unable to parse package file /var/lib/apt/lists/partial/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_natty-updates_multiverse_i18n_Index (1) I actually tried this before, but i am always getting this error --Executing: gpg --ignore-time-conflict --no-options --no-default-keyring --secret-keyring /etc/apt/secring.gpg --trustdb-name /etc/apt/trustdb.gpg --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --primary-keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 8C851674F96FD737 gpg: requesting key F96FD737 from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com ?: keyserver.ubuntu.com: Connection refused gpgkeys: HTTP fetch error 7: couldn't connect: Connection refused gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found. gpg: Total number processed: 0

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• SSIS - XML Source Script

  - by simonsabin

  The XML Source in SSIS is great if you have a 1 to 1 mapping between entity and table. You can do more complex mapping but it becomes very messy and won't perform. What other options do you have? The challenge with XML processing is to not need a huge amount of memory. I remember using the early versions of Biztalk with loaded the whole document into memory to map from one document type to another. This was fine for small documents but was an absolute killer for large documents. You therefore need a streaming approach. For flexibility however you want to be able to generate your rows easily, and if you've ever used the XmlReader you will know its ugly code to write. That brings me on to LINQ. The is an implementation of LINQ over XML which is really nice. You can write nice LINQ queries instead of the XMLReader stuff. The downside is that by default LINQ to XML requires a whole XML document to work with. No streaming. Your code would look like this. We create an XDocument and then enumerate over a set of annoymous types we generate from our LINQ statement XDocument x = XDocument.Load("C:\\TEMP\\CustomerOrders-Attribute.xml");   foreach (var xdata in (from customer in x.Elements("OrderInterface").Elements("Customer")                        from order in customer.Elements("Orders").Elements("Order")                        select new { Account = customer.Attribute("AccountNumber").Value                                   , OrderDate = order.Attribute("OrderDate").Value }                        )) {     Output0Buffer.AddRow();     Output0Buffer.AccountNumber = xdata.Account;     Output0Buffer.OrderDate = Convert.ToDateTime(xdata.OrderDate); } As I said the downside to this is that you are loading the whole document into memory. I did some googling and came across some helpful videos from a nice UK DPE Mike Taulty http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/screencasts/screencast/289/LINQ-to-XML-Streaming-In-Large-Documents.aspx. Which show you how you can combine LINQ and the XmlReader to get a semi streaming approach. I took what he did and implemented it in SSIS. What I found odd was that when I ran it I got different numbers between using the streamed and non streamed versions. I found the cause was a little bug in Mikes code that causes the pointer in the XmlReader to progress past the start of the element and thus foreach (var xdata in (from customer in StreamReader("C:\\TEMP\\CustomerOrders-Attribute.xml","Customer")                                from order in customer.Elements("Orders").Elements("Order")                                select new { Account = customer.Attribute("AccountNumber").Value                                           , OrderDate = order.Attribute("OrderDate").Value }                                ))         {             Output0Buffer.AddRow();             Output0Buffer.AccountNumber = xdata.Account;             Output0Buffer.OrderDate = Convert.ToDateTime(xdata.OrderDate);         } These look very similiar and they are the key element is the method we are calling, StreamReader. This method is what gives us streaming, what it does is return a enumerable list of elements, because of the way that LINQ works this results in the data being streamed in. static IEnumerable<XElement> StreamReader(String filename, string elementName) {     using (XmlReader xr = XmlReader.Create(filename))     {         xr.MoveToContent();         while (xr.Read()) //Reads the first element         {             while (xr.NodeType == XmlNodeType.Element && xr.Name == elementName)             {                 XElement node = (XElement)XElement.ReadFrom(xr);                   yield return node;             }         }         xr.Close();     } } This code is specifically designed to return a list of the elements with a specific name. The first Read reads the root element and then the inner while loop checks to see if the current element is the type we want. If not we do the xr.Read() again until we find the element type we want. We then use the neat function XElement.ReadFrom to read an element and all its sub elements into an XElement. This is what is returned and can be consumed by the LINQ statement. Essentially once one element has been read we need to check if we are still on the same element type and name (the inner loop) This was Mikes mistake, if we called .Read again we would advance the XmlReader beyond the start of the Element and so the ReadFrom method wouldn't work. So with the code above you can use what ever LINQ statement you like to flatten your XML into the rowsets you want. You could even have multiple outputs and generate your own surrogate keys.        

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 22, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 22, 2010New Projects[Tool] Vczh Non-public DLL Classes Caller: Generate C# code for you to call non-public classes in DLLs very easily.Artefact Animator: Artefact Animator provides an easy to use framework for procedural time-based animations in Silverlight and WPF.cacheroo: Cacheroo is a social networking community that will make it easier for people who love geocaching to get connected.Data Processing Toolkit: An utility app to collected data from different sources (i.e. bugzilla bug reports) in a structured way. We are currently setting up the site. Mo...eXternal SQL Bridge (PHP): The eXternal SQL Bridge (XSB) allows you to bridge two websites together in a secure manner through pre-shared keys. XSB is resilient against repla...'G' - Language to Define Gestures for Touch Based Applications: A cross plat form multi-touch application framework with a language to define gestures. The application is build on Silverlight 4.0 and the languag...IIS Network Diagnostic Tools: Web implementation of "looking glass" like services (ping, traceroute) as HTTP modules for Internet Information Services.Interop Router: This project establishes a communication framework and job dispatcher for a mixed operating system cluster environment.L2 Commander: L2Commander makes it easier for both new and old l2j users to manage your server.You no longer have to waste time on finding the files you need and...MediaHelper: A utility to help clean up empty/unwanted files and folders in your filesystem.mhinze: matt hinze stuffOneMan: Focus on Silverlight and WCF technology.Rss Photo Frame Android Widget: RSS Photo Frame Android Widget permits showing pictures from any RSS feed on your Android device's desktopSingle Web Session: Web Tool Kits Current project provide developer with different tools that help to enhance web site performance, security, and other common functio...Work Item Visualization: Use DGML to visualize and analyze your TFS Work Items. Included is the ability to perform basic risk/impact analysis. It helps answer the question,...New Releases[Tool] Vczh Non-public DLL Classes Caller: Wrapper Coder (beta): Click "<Click Me To Open Assembly File>", WrapperCoder will load the assembly and referenced assembly. Check the non-public classes that you want...APS - Automatic Print Screen: APS 1.0: APS automatizes the tasks of paste the image in Paint and save it after print screen or alt+print screen. Choose directory, name and file extension...BTP Tools: e-Sword generator build 20100321: 1. Modify the indent after subtitle. 2. Add 2 spaces after subtitle.Combres - WebForm & MVC Client-side Resource Combine Library: Combres 2.0: Changes since last version (1.2) Support ignore Combres pipeline in debug mode - see issue #6088 Debug mode generates comment helping identify in...Desafio Office 2010 Brasil: DesafioOutlook: Controlando um robo com o Outlook 2010dylan.NET: dylan.NET v. 9.4: Adding Platform Invocation Services Support, full Managed Pointer Support, Charset,Dllimport,Callconv setting for P/Invoke, MarshalAs for parametersFamily Tree Analyzer: Version 1.3.2.0: Version 1.3.2.0 Add open folder button to IGI Search Form Fixes to Fact Location processing - IGIName renamed to RegionID Fix if Region ID not fou...Fasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection API: Fasterflect 2.0: We are pleased to release version 2.0 of Fasterflect, which contains a lot of additions and improvements from the previous version. Please refer t...IIS Network Diagnostic Tools: 1.0: Initial public release.Informant: Informant (Desktop) v0.1: This release allows users to send sms messages to 1-Many Groups or 1-Many contacts. It is a very basic release of the application. No styling has b...InfoService: InfoService v1.5 - MPE1 Package: InfoService Release v1.5.0.65 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.InfoService: InfoService v1.5 - RAR Package: InfoService Release v1.5.0.65 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.L2 Commander: Source Code Link: Where to find our source.ModularCMS: ModularCMS 1.2: Minor bug fixes.NMTools: NMTools-v40b0-20100321-0: The most noticeable aspect of this release is that NMTools is now an independent project. It will no longer tied to OpenSLIM. Nevertheless, OpenSLI...SharePoint LogViewer: SharePoint LogViewer 1.5.3: Log loading performance enhanced. Search text box now has auto complete feature.Single Web Session: Single Web Session: !Single Web Session! <httpModules> <add name="SingleSession" type="SingleWebSession.Model.WebSessionModule, SingleWebSession"/> </httpModules>Sprite Sheet Packer: 2.1 Release: Made a few crucial fixes from 2.0: - Fixed error with paths having spaces. - Fixed error with UI not unlocking. - Fixed NullReferenceException on ...uManage - AD Self-Service Portal: uManage v1.1 (.NET 4.0 RC): Updated Releasev1.1 Adds the primary ability to setup and configure the application through a setup wizard. The setup wizard will continue to evol...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30321.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVS ChessMania: VS ChessMania V2 March Beta: Second Beta Release with move correction and making application more safe for user. New features will be added soon.WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke: CKEditor Provider 1.9.00: Whats New Added New Toolbar Plugin (By Kent Safransk) 'MediaEmbed' to Include Embed Media from Youtube, Vimeo, etc. Media Embed Plugin Added New ...WeatherBar: WeatherBar 1.0 [No Installation]: Extract the ZIP archive and run WeatherBar.exe. Current release contains some bugs that will be fixed in the next version. Check the Issue Tracker...Work Item Visualization: Release 1.0: This is the initial release of the Work Item Visualization tool. There are no known issues when it comes to the visualization aspects of the tool b...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 1.0.0.10: Version: 1.0.0.10 (Milestone 10): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requi...WPF AutoComplete TextBox Control: Version 1.2: What's Newadds AutoAppend feature adds a new provider: UrlHistoryDataProvider sample application is updated to reflect the new things Bug Fixe...ZoomBarPlus: V2 (Beta): - Fixed bug: if the active window changed while you were in the middle of a single tap delay, long tap delay, or swipe-repeat, it would continue re...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpSavvy DateTimeRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)Most Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDirectQPHPExcelFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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• SharePoint – The Most Important Feature

  - by Bil Simser

  Watching twitter and doing a search for SharePoint and you see a lot (almost one every few minutes) of tweets about the top 10 new features in SharePoint. What answer do you get when you ask the question, “What’s the most important feature in SharePoint?”. Chances are the answer will vary. Some will say it’s the collaboration aspect, others might say it’s the new ribbon interface, multi-item editing, external content types, faceted search, large list support, document versioning, Silverlight, etc. The list goes on. However I think most people might be missing the most important feature that’s sitting right under their noses all this time. The most important feature of SharePoint? It’s called User Empowerment. Huh? What? Is that something I find in the Site Actions menu? Nope. It’s something that’s always been there in SharePoint, you just need to get the word out and support it. How many times have you had a team ask you for a team site (assuming you had SharePoint up and running). Or to create them a contact list. Or how long have you employed that guy in the corner who’s been copying and pasting content from Corporate Communications into the web from a Word document. Let’s stop the insanity. It doesn’t have to be this way. SharePoint’s strongest feature isn’t anything you can find in the Site Settings screen or Central Admin. It’s all about empowering your users and letting them take control of their content. After all, SharePoint really is a bunch of tools to allow users to collaborate on content isn’t it? So why are you stepping in as IT and helping the user every moment along the way. It’s like having to ask users to fill out a help desk ticket or call up the Windows team to create a folder on their desktop or rearrange their Start menu. This isn’t something IT should be spending their time doing nor is it something the users should be burdened with having to wait until their friendly neighborhood tech-guy (or gal) shows up to help them sort the icons on their desktop. SharePoint IS all about empowerment. Site owners can create whatever lists and libraries they need for their team, and if the template isn’t there they can always turn to my friend and yours, the Custom List. From that can spew forth approval tracking systems, new hire checklists, and server inventory. You’re only limited by your imagination and needs. Users should be able to create new sites as they need. Want a blog to let everyone know what your team is up to? Go create one, here’s how. What’s a blog you ask? Here’s what it is and why you would use one. SharePoint is the shift in the balance of power and you need, and an IT group, let go of certain responsibilities and let your users run with the tools. A power user who knows how to create sites and what features are available to them can help a team go from the forming stage to the storming stage overnight. Again, this all hinges on you as an IT organization and what you can and empower your users with as far as features go. Running with tools is great if you know how to use them, running with scissors not recommended unless you enjoy trips to the hospital. With Great Power comes Great Responsibility so don’t go out on Monday and send out a memo to the organization saying “This Bil guy says you peeps can do anything so here it is, knock yourself out” (for one, they’ll have *no* idea who this Bil guy is). This advice comes with the task of getting your users ready for empowerment. Whether it’s through some kind of internal training sessions, in-house documentation; videos; blog posts; on how to accomplish things in SharePoint, or full blown one-on-one sit downs with teams or individuals to help them through their problems. The work is up to you. Helping them along also should be part of your governance (you do have one don’t you?). Just because you have InfoPath client deployed with your Office suite, doesn’t mean users should just start publishing forms all over your SharePoint farm. There should be some governance behind that in what you’ll support and what is possible. The other caveat to all this is that SharePoint is not everything for everyone. It can’t cook you breakfast and impregnate your cat or solve world hunger. It also isn’t suited for every IT solution out there. It’s a horrible source control system (even though some people try to use it as such) and really can’t do financials worth a darn. Again, governance is key here and part of that governance and your responsibility in setting up and unleashing SharePoint into your organization is to provide users guidance on what should be in SharePoint and (more importantly) what should not be in SharePoint. There are boundaries you have to set where you don’t want your end users going as they might be treading into trouble. Again, this is up to you to set these constraints and help users understand why these pylons are there. If someone understands why they can’t do something they might have a better understanding and respect for those that put them there in the first place. Of course you’ll always have the power-users who want to go skiing down dead mans curve so this doesn’t work for everyone, but you can catch the majority of the newbs who don’t wander aimlessly off the beaten path. At the end of the day when all things are going swimmingly your end users should be empowered to solve the needs they have on a day to day basis and not having to keep bugging the IT department to help them create a view to show only approved documents. I wouldn’t go as far as business users building out full blown solutions and handing the keys to SharePoint Designer or (worse) Visual Studio to power-users might not be a path you want to go down but you also don’t have to lock up the SharePoint system in a tight box where users can’t use what’s there. So stop focusing on the shiny things in SharePoint and maybe consider making a shift to what’s really important. Making your day job easier and letting users get the most our of your technology investment.

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• LLBLGen Pro v3.1 released!

  - by FransBouma

  Yesterday we released LLBLGen Pro v3.1! Version 3.1 comes with new features and enhancements, which I'll describe briefly below. v3.1 is a free upgrade for v3.x licensees. What's new / changed? Designer Extensible Import system. An extensible import system has been added to the designer to import project data from external sources. Importers are plug-ins which import project meta-data (like entity definitions, mappings and relational model data) from an external source into the loaded project. In v3.1, an importer plug-in for importing project elements from existing LLBLGen Pro v3.x project files has been included. You can use this importer to create source projects from which you import parts of models to build your actual project with. Model-only relationships. In v3.1, relationships of the type 1:1, m:1 and 1:n can be marked as model-only. A model-only relationship isn't required to have a backing foreign key constraint in the relational model data. They're ideal for projects which have to work with relational databases where changes can't always be made or some relationships can't be added to (e.g. the ones which are important for the entity model, but are not allowed to be added to the relational model for some reason). Custom field ordering. Although fields in an entity definition don't really have an ordering, it can be important for some situations to have the entity fields in a given order, e.g. when you use compound primary keys. Field ordering can be defined using a pop-up dialog which can be opened through various ways, e.g. inside the project explorer, model view and entity editor. It can also be set automatically during refreshes based on new settings. Command line relational model data refresher tool, CliRefresher.exe. The command line refresh tool shipped with v2.6 is now available for v3.1 as well Navigation enhancements in various designer elements. It's now easier to find elements like entities, typed views etc. in the project explorer from editors, to navigate to related entities in the project explorer by right clicking a relationship, navigate to the super-type in the project explorer when right-clicking an entity and navigate to the sub-type in the project explorer when right-clicking a sub-type node in the project explorer. Minor visual enhancements / tweaks LLBLGen Pro Runtime Framework Entity creation is now up to 30% faster and takes 5% less memory. Creating an entity object has been optimized further by tweaks inside the framework to make instantiating an entity object up to 30% faster. It now also takes up to 5% less memory than in v3.0 Prefetch Path node merging is now up to 20-25% faster. Setting entity references required the creation of a new relationship object. As this relationship object is always used internally it could be cached (as it's used for syncing only). This increases performance by 20-25% in the merging functionality. Entity fetches are now up to 20% faster. A large number of tweaks have been applied to make entity fetches up to 20% faster than in v3.0. Full WCF RIA support. It's now possible to use your LLBLGen Pro runtime framework powered domain layer in a WCF RIA application using the VS.NET tools for WCF RIA services. WCF RIA services is a Microsoft technology for .NET 4 and typically used within silverlight applications. SQL Server DQE compatibility level is now per instance. (Usable in Adapter). It's now possible to set the compatibility level of the SQL Server Dynamic Query Engine (DQE) per instance of the DQE instead of the global setting it was before. The global setting is still available and is used as the default value for the compatibility level per-instance. You can use this to switch between CE Desktop and normal SQL Server compatibility per DataAccessAdapter instance. Support for COUNT_BIG aggregate function (SQL Server specific). The aggregate function COUNT_BIG has been added to the list of available aggregate functions to be used in the framework. Minor changes / tweaks I'm especially pleased with the import system, as that makes working with entity models a lot easier. The import system lets you import from another LLBLGen Pro v3 project any entity definition, mapping and / or meta-data like table definitions. This way you can build repository projects where you store model fragments, e.g. the building blocks for a customer-order system, a user credential model etc., any model you can think of. In most projects, you'll recognize that some parts of your new model look familiar. In these cases it would have been easier if you would have been able to import these parts from projects you had pre-created. With LLBLGen Pro v3.1 you can. For example, say you have an Oracle schema called CRM which contains the bread 'n' butter customer-order-product kind of model. You create an entity model from that schema and save it in a project file. Now you start working on another project for another customer and you have to use SQL Server. You also start using model-first development, so develop the entity model from scratch as there's no existing database. As this customer also requires some CRM like entity model, you import the entities from your saved Oracle project into this new SQL Server targeting project. Because you don't work with Oracle this time, you don't import the relational meta-data, just the entities, their relationships and possibly their inheritance hierarchies, if any. As they're now entities in your project you can change them a bit to match the new customer's requirements. This can save you a lot of time, because you can re-use pre-fab model fragments for new projects. In the example above there are no tables yet (as you work model first) so using the forward mapping capabilities of LLBLGen Pro v3 creates the tables, PK constraints, Unique Constraints and FK constraints for you. This way you can build a nice repository of model fragments which you can re-use in new projects.

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• Using the HTML5 &lt;input type=&quot;file&quot; multiple=&quot;multiple&quot;&gt; Tag in ASP.NET

  - by Rick Strahl

  Per HTML5 spec the <input type="file" /> tag allows for multiple files to be picked from a single File upload button. This is actually a very subtle change that's very useful as it makes it much easier to send multiple files to the server without using complex uploader controls. Please understand though, that even though you can send multiple files using the <input type="file" /> tag, the process of how those files are sent hasn't really changed - there's still no progress information or other hooks that allow you to automatically make for a nicer upload experience without additional libraries or code. For that you will still need some sort of library (I'll post an example in my next blog post using plUpload). All the new features allow for is to make it easier to select multiple images from disk in one operation. Where you might have required many file upload controls before to upload several files, one File control can potentially do the job. How it works To create a file input box that allows with multiple file support you can simply do:<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"> <label>Upload Images:</label> <input type="file" multiple="multiple" name="File1" id="File1" accept="image/*" /> <hr /> <input type="submit" id="btnUpload" value="Upload Images" /> </form> Now when the file open dialog pops up - depending on the browser and whether the browser supports it - you can pick multiple files. Here I'm using Firefox using the thumbnail preview I can easily pick images to upload on a form: Note that I can select multiple images in the dialog all of which get stored in the file textbox. The UI for this can be different in some browsers. For example Chrome displays 3 files selected as text next to the Browse… button when I choose three rather than showing any files in the textbox. Most other browsers display the standard file input box and display the multiple filenames as a comma delimited list in the textbox. Note that you can also specify the accept attribute in the <input> tag, which specifies a mime-type to specify what type of content to allow.Here I'm only allowing images (image/*) and the browser complies by just showing me image files to display. Likewise I could use text/* for all text formats registered on the machine or text/xml to only show XML files (which would include xml,xst,xsd etc.). Capturing Files on the Server with ASP.NET When you upload files to an ASP.NET server there are a couple of things to be aware of. When multiple files are uploaded from a single file control, they are assigned the same name. In other words if I select 3 files to upload on the File1 control shown above I get three file form variables named File1. This means I can't easily retrieve files by their name:HttpPostedFileBase file = Request.Files["File1"]; because there will be multiple files for a given name. The above only selects the first file. Instead you can only reliably retrieve files by their index. Below is an example I use in app to capture a number of images uploaded and store them into a database using a business object and EF 4.2.for (int i = 0; i < Request.Files.Count; i++) { HttpPostedFileBase file = Request.Files[i]; if (file.ContentLength == 0) continue; if (file.ContentLength > App.Configuration.MaxImageUploadSize) { ErrorDisplay.ShowError("File " + file.FileName + " is too large. Max upload size is: " + App.Configuration.MaxImageUploadSize); return View("UploadClassic",model); } var image = new ClassifiedsBusiness.Image(); var ms = new MemoryStream(16498); file.InputStream.CopyTo(ms); image.Entered = DateTime.Now; image.EntryId = model.Entry.Id; image.ContentType = "image/jpeg"; image.ImageData = ms.ToArray(); ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin); // resize image if necessary and turn into jpeg Bitmap bmp = Imaging.ResizeImage(ms.ToArray(), App.Configuration.MaxImageWidth, App.Configuration.MaxImageHeight); ms.Close(); ms = new MemoryStream(); bmp.Save(ms,ImageFormat.Jpeg); image.ImageData = ms.ToArray(); bmp.Dispose(); ms.Close(); model.Entry.Images.Add(image); } This works great and also allows you to capture input from multiple input controls if you are dealing with browsers that don't support multiple file selections in the file upload control. The important thing here is that I iterate over the files by index, rather than using a foreach loop over the Request.Files collection. The files collection returns key name strings, rather than the actual files (who thought that was good idea at Microsoft?), and so that isn't going to work since you end up getting multiple keys with the same name. Instead a plain for loop has to be used to loop over all files. Another Option in ASP.NET MVC If you're using ASP.NET MVC you can use the code above as well, but you have yet another option to capture multiple uploaded files by using a parameter for your post action method.public ActionResult Save(HttpPostedFileBase[] file1) { foreach (var file in file1) { if (file.ContentLength < 0) continue; // do something with the file }} Note that in order for this to work you have to specify each posted file variable individually in the parameter list. This works great if you have a single file upload to deal with. You can also pass this in addition to your main model to separate out a ViewModel and a set of uploaded files:public ActionResult Edit(EntryViewModel model,HttpPostedFileBase[] uploadedFile) You can also make the uploaded files part of the ViewModel itself - just make sure you use the appropriate naming for the variable name in the HTML document (since there's Html.FileFor() extension). Browser Support You knew this was coming, right? The feature is really nice, but unfortunately not supported universally yet. Once again Internet Explorer is the problem: No shipping version of Internet Explorer supports multiple file uploads. IE10 supposedly will, but even IE9 does not. All other major browsers - Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera - support multi-file uploads in their latest versions. So how can you handle this? If you need to provide multiple file uploads you can simply add multiple file selection boxes and let people either select multiple files with a single upload file box or use multiples. Alternately you can do some browser detection and if IE is used simply show the extra file upload boxes. It's not ideal, but either one of these approaches makes life easier for folks that use a decent browser and leaves you with a functional interface for those that don't. Here's a UI I recently built as an alternate uploader with multiple file upload buttons: I say this is my 'alternate' uploader - for my primary uploader I continue to use an add-in solution. Specifically I use plUpload and I'll discuss how that's implemented in my next post. Although I think that plUpload (and many of the other packaged JavaScript upload solutions) are a better choice especially for large uploads, for simple one file uploads input boxes work well enough. The advantage of this solution is that it's very easy to handle on the server side. Any of the JavaScript controls require special handling for uploads which I'll also discuss in my next post.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in HTML5  ASP.NET  MVC   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine

  - by danx

  Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine Cryptography is a major component of secure e-commerce. Since cryptography is compute intensive and adds a significant load to applications, such as SSL web servers (https), crypto performance is an important factor. Providing accelerated crypto hardware greatly helps these applications and will help lead to a wider adoption of cryptography, and lower cost, in e-commerce and other applications. The Intel Westmere microprocessor has six new instructions to acclerate AES encryption. They are called "AESNI" for "AES New Instructions". These are unprivileged instructions, so no "root", other elevated access, or context switch is required to execute these instructions. These instructions are used in a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine available in Solaris 11, the aesni engine. Previous Work Previously, AESNI instructions were introduced into the Solaris x86 kernel and libraries. That is, the "aes" kernel module (used by IPsec and other kernel modules) and the Solaris pkcs11 library (for user applications). These are available in Solaris 10 10/09 (update 8) and above, and Solaris 11. The work here is to add the aesni engine to OpenSSL. X86 AESNI Instructions Intel's Xeon 5600 is one of the processors that support AESNI. This processor is used in the Sun Fire X4170 M2 As mentioned above, six new instructions acclerate AES encryption in processor silicon. The new instructions are: aesenc performs one round of AES encryption. One encryption round is composed of these steps: substitute bytes, shift rows, mix columns, and xor the round key. aesenclast performs the final encryption round, which is the same as above, except omitting the mix columns (which is only needed for the next encryption round). aesdec performs one round of AES decryption aesdeclast performs the final AES decryption round aeskeygenassist Helps expand the user-provided key into a "key schedule" of keys, one per round aesimc performs an "inverse mixed columns" operation to convert the encryption key schedule into a decryption key schedule pclmulqdq Not a AESNI instruction, but performs "carryless multiply" operations to acclerate AES GCM mode. Since the AESNI instructions are implemented in hardware, they take a constant number of cycles and are not vulnerable to side-channel timing attacks that attempt to discern some bits of data from the time taken to encrypt or decrypt the data. Solaris x86 and OpenSSL Software Optimizations Having X86 AESNI hardware crypto instructions is all well and good, but how do we access it? The software is available with Solaris 11 and is used automatically if you are running Solaris x86 on a AESNI-capable processor. AESNI is used internally in the kernel through kernel crypto modules and is available in user space through the PKCS#11 library. For OpenSSL on Solaris 11, AESNI crypto is available directly with a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine, called the "aesni engine." This is in lieu of the extra overhead of going through the Solaris OpenSSL pkcs11 engine, which accesses Solaris crypto and digest operations. Instead, AESNI assembly is included directly in the new aesni engine. Instead of including the aesni engine in a separate library in /lib/openssl/engines/, the aesni engine is "built-in", meaning it is included directly in OpenSSL's libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library. This reduces overhead and the need to manually specify the aesni engine. Since the engine is built-in (that is, in libcrypto.so.1.0.0), the openssl -engine command line flag or API call is not needed to access the engine—the aesni engine is used automatically on AESNI hardware. Ciphers and Digests supported by OpenSSL aesni engine The Openssl aesni engine auto-detects if it's running on AESNI hardware and uses AESNI encryption instructions for these ciphers: AES-128-CBC, AES-192-CBC, AES-256-CBC, AES-128-CFB128, AES-192-CFB128, AES-256-CFB128, AES-128-CTR, AES-192-CTR, AES-256-CTR, AES-128-ECB, AES-192-ECB, AES-256-ECB, AES-128-OFB, AES-192-OFB, and AES-256-OFB. Implementation of the OpenSSL aesni engine The AESNI assembly language routines are not a part of the regular Openssl 1.0.0 release. AESNI is a part of the "HEAD" ("development" or "unstable") branch of OpenSSL, for future release. But AESNI is also available as a separate patch provided by Intel to the OpenSSL project for OpenSSL 1.0.0. A minimal amount of "glue" code in the aesni engine works between the OpenSSL libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library and the assembly functions. The aesni engine code is separate from the base OpenSSL code and requires patching only a few source files to use it. That means OpenSSL can be more easily updated to future versions without losing the performance from the built-in aesni engine. OpenSSL aesni engine Performance Here's some graphs of aesni engine performance I measured by running openssl speed -evp $algorithm where $algorithm is aes-128-cbc, aes-192-cbc, and aes-256-cbc. These are using the 64-bit version of openssl on the same AESNI hardware, a Sun Fire X4170 M2 with a Intel Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz, running Solaris 11 FCS. "Before" is openssl without the aesni engine and "after" is openssl with the aesni engine. The numbers are MBytes/second. OpenSSL aesni engine performance on Sun Fire X4170 M2 (Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz) (Higher is better; "before"=OpenSSL on AESNI without AESNI engine software, "after"=OpenSSL AESNI engine) As you can see the speedup is dramatic for all 3 key lengths and for data sizes from 16 bytes to 8 Kbytes—AESNI is about 7.5-8x faster over hand-coded amd64 assembly (without aesni instructions). Verifying the OpenSSL aesni engine is present The easiest way to determine if you are running the aesni engine is to type "openssl engine" on the command line. No configuration, API, or command line options are needed to use the OpenSSL aesni engine. If you are running on Intel AESNI hardware with Solaris 11 FCS, you'll see this output indicating you are using the aesni engine: intel-westmere $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support If you are running on Intel without AESNI hardware you'll see this output indicating the hardware can't support the aesni engine: intel-nehalem $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support For Solaris on SPARC or older Solaris OpenSSL software, you won't see any aesni engine line at all. Third-party OpenSSL software (built yourself or from outside Oracle) will not have the aesni engine either. Solaris 11 FCS comes with OpenSSL version 1.0.0e. The output of typing "openssl version" should be "OpenSSL 1.0.0e 6 Sep 2011". 64- and 32-bit OpenSSL OpenSSL comes in both 32- and 64-bit binaries. 64-bit executable is now the default, at /usr/bin/openssl, and OpenSSL 64-bit libraries at /lib/amd64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0 The 32-bit executable is at /usr/bin/i86/openssl and the libraries are at /lib/libcrytpo.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0. Availability The OpenSSL AESNI engine is available in Solaris 11 x86 for both the 64- and 32-bit versions of OpenSSL. It is not available with Solaris 10. You must have a processor that supports AESNI instructions, otherwise OpenSSL will fallback to the older, slower AES implementation without AESNI. Processors that support AESNI include most Westmere and Sandy Bridge class processor architectures. Some low-end processors (such as for mobile/laptop platforms) do not support AESNI. The easiest way to determine if the processor supports AESNI is with the isainfo -v command—look for "amd64" and "aes" in the output: $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu Conclusion The Solaris 11 OpenSSL aesni engine provides easy access to powerful Intel AESNI hardware cryptography, in addition to Solaris userland PKCS#11 libraries and Solaris crypto kernel modules.

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• Computer crashes on resume from standby almost every time

  - by Los Frijoles

  I am running Ubuntu 12.04 on a Core i5 2500K and ASRock Z68 Pro3-M motherboard (no graphics card, hd is a WD Green 1TB, and cd drive is some cheap lite-on drive). Since installing 12.04, my computer has been freezing after resume, but not every time. When I start to resume, it starts going normally with a blinking cursor on the screen and then sometimes it will continue on to the gnome 3 unlock screen. Most of the time, however, it will blink for a little bit and then the monitor will flip modes and shut off due to no signal. Pressing keys on the keyboard gets no response (num lock light doesn't respond, Ctrl-Alt-F1 fails to drop it into a terminal, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace doesn't work) and so I assume the computer is crashed. The worst part is, the logs look entirely normal. Here is my system log during one of these crashes and my subsequent hard poweroff and restart: Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[10448]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-2, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[10448]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-2, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[10448]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-1, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[12419]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-0, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[10448]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-0, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 22:09:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[9061]: (root) CMD ( [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete) Jun 6 22:17:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[22142]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly) Jun 6 22:39:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[26909]: (root) CMD ( [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete) Jun 6 22:54:21 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [57905.560822] show_signal_msg: 36 callbacks suppressed Jun 6 22:54:21 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [57905.560828] chromium-browse[9139]: segfault at 0 ip 00007f3a78efade0 sp 00007fff7e2d2c18 error 4 in chromium-browser[7f3a76604000+412b000] Jun 6 23:05:43 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [58586.415158] chromium-browse[21025]: segfault at 0 ip 00007f3a78efade0 sp 00007fff7e2d2c18 error 4 in chromium-browser[7f3a76604000+412b000] Jun 6 23:09:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[13542]: (root) CMD ( [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete) Jun 6 23:12:43 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [59006.317590] usb 2-1.7: USB disconnect, device number 8 Jun 6 23:12:43 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [59006.319672] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdg] Synchronizing SCSI cache Jun 6 23:12:43 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [59006.319737] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdg] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK Jun 6 23:17:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[26580]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly) Jun 6 23:19:04 kcuzner-desktop acpid: client connected from 29925[0:0] Jun 6 23:19:04 kcuzner-desktop acpid: 1 client rule loaded Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Successfully made thread 30131 of process 30131 (n/a) owned by '104' high priority at nice level -11. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Supervising 1 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Successfully made thread 30162 of process 30131 (n/a) owned by '104' RT at priority 5. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Supervising 2 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Successfully made thread 30163 of process 30131 (n/a) owned by '104' RT at priority 5. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Supervising 3 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint registered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/HFPAG Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint registered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSource Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint registered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSink Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Successfully made thread 30166 of process 30166 (n/a) owned by '104' high priority at nice level -11. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Supervising 4 threads of 2 processes of 1 users. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop pulseaudio[30166]: [pulseaudio] pid.c: Daemon already running. Jun 6 23:19:10 kcuzner-desktop acpid: client 2942[0:0] has disconnected Jun 6 23:19:10 kcuzner-desktop acpid: client 29925[0:0] has disconnected Jun 6 23:19:10 kcuzner-desktop acpid: client connected from 1286[0:0] Jun 6 23:19:10 kcuzner-desktop acpid: 1 client rule loaded Jun 6 23:19:31 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint unregistered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/HFPAG Jun 6 23:19:31 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint unregistered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSource Jun 6 23:19:31 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint unregistered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSink Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop kernel: imklog 5.8.6, log source = /proc/kmsg started. Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="5.8.6" x-pid="1053" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] start Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop rsyslogd: rsyslogd's groupid changed to 103 Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop rsyslogd: rsyslogd's userid changed to 101 Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop rsyslogd-2039: Could not open output pipe '/dev/xconsole' [try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/2039 ] Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Ericsson MBM Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Sierra Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Generic Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Huawei Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Linktop Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1072]: Failed to init gatt_example plugin Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1072]: Listening for HCI events on hci0 Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop NetworkManager[1080]: <info> NetworkManager (version 0.9.4.0) is starting... Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop NetworkManager[1080]: <info> Read config file /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop NetworkManager[1080]: <info> VPN: loaded org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop NetworkManager[1080]: <info> DNS: loaded plugin dnsmasq Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu Sorry it's so huge; the restart happens at 23:28:12 I believe and all I see is that chromium segfaulted a few times. I wouldn't think a segfault from an individual program on the computer would crash it, but could that be the issue?

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• 24+ Coda Alternatives for Windows and Linux

  - by Matt

  Coda plays an important role in designing layout on Mac. There are numerous coda alternatives for windows and Linux too. It is not possible to describe each and everyone so some of the coda alternatives, which work on both windows and Linux platforms, are discussed below. EditPlus $35.00 Good thing about EditPlus is that it highlights URLs and email addresses, activating them when you ‘crtl + double-click’. It also has a built in browser for previewing HTML, and FTP and SFTP support. Also supports Macros and RegEx find and replace. UltraEdit $49.99 It is another good coda alternative for windows and Linux. It is the best suited editor for text, HTML and HEX. It also plays an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. It supports disk-based 64-bit or standard file handling on 32-bit Windows platforms or window 2000 and later versions. HippoEdit $39.95 HippoEDIT has the best autocomplete it gives pop a ‘tooltip’ above your cursor as you type, suggesting words you’ve already typed. It does syntax highlighting for over 2 dozen language. Sublime Text $59.00 Sublime Text awesome ‘zoomed out’ view of the file lets you focus on the area you want. It lets you open a local file when you right-click on its link, and there are a few automation features, so this would make a solid choice of a text editor. Textpad $24.70 TextPad is simple editor with nifty features such as column select, drag-and-drop text between files, and hyperlink support. It also supports large files. Aptana Free Aptana Studio is one of the best editors working on both windows and Linux. It is a complete web development setting that has a nice blend of powerful authoring tools with a collection of online hosting and collaboration services. It is quite helpful as it support for PHP, CSS, FTP, and more. SciTE Free It is a SCIntilla based Text Editor. It has gradually developed as a generally useful editor. It provides for building and running programs. It is best to be used for jobs with simple configurations. SciTE is currently available for Intel Win32 and Linux compatible operating systems with GTK+. It has been run on Windows XP and on Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10 with GTK+ 2.12 E Text Editor $34.96 E Text Editor is a new text editor for Windows, which also works on Linux as well. It has powerful editing features and also some unique abilities. It makes text manipulation quite fast and easy, and makes user focus on his writing as it automatically does all the manual work. It can be extend it in any language. It supports Text Mate bundles, thus allows the user to tap into a huge and active community. Editra Free Editra is an upcoming editor, with some fantastic features such as user profiles, auto-completion, session saving, and syntax highlighing for 60+ languages. Plugins can extend the feature set, offering an integrated python console, FTP client, file browser, and calculator, among others. PSPad Free PSPad is a good Template for writing CSS, as it an internal web browser, and a macro recorder to the table. It also supports hex editing, and some degree of code compiling. JEdit Free It is a mature programmer’s text editor and has taken a good deal of time to be developed as it is today. It is better than many costlier development tools due to its features and simplicity of use. It has been released as free software with full source code, provided under the terms of the GPL 2.0. Which also adds to its attractiveness. NEdit Free It is a multi-purpose text editor for the X Window System, which also works on Linux. It combines a standard, easy to use, graphical user interface with the full functionality and stability required by users who edit text for long period a day. It also provides for thorough support for development in various languages. It also facilitates the use of text processors, and other tools at the same time. It can be used productively by anyone who needs to edit text. It is quite a user-friendly tool. Its salient features include syntax highlighting with built in pattern, auto indent, tab emulation, block indentation adjustment etc. As of version 5.1, NEdit may be freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. MadEdit Free Mad Edit is an Open-Source and Cross-Platform Text/Hex Editor. It is written in C++ and wxWidgets. MadEdit can edit files in Text/Column/Hex modes. It also supports many useful functions, such as Syntax Highlighting, Word Wrap, Encoding for UTF8/16/32,and others. It also supports word count, which makes it quite a useful text editor for both windows and Linux. It has been recently modified on 10/09/2010. KompoZer Free Kompozer is a complete web authoring system that has a combination of web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing. KompoZer has been designed to be completely and extensively easy to use. It is thus an ideal tool for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without knowing HTML or web coding. It is based on the NVU source code. Vim Free Vim or “Vi IMproved” is an advanced text editor. Its salient features are syntax highlighting, word completion and it also has a huge amount of contributed content. Vim has several “modes” on offer for editing, which adds to the efficiency in editing. Thus it becomes a non-user-friendly application but it is also strength for its users. The normal mode binds alphanumeric keys to task-oriented commands. The visual mode highlights text. More tools for search & replace, defining functions, etc. are offered through command line mode. Vim comes with complete help. NotePad ++ Free One of the the best free text editor for Windows out there; with support for simple things—like syntax highlighting and folding—all the way up to FTP, Notepad++ should tick most of the boxes Notepad2 Free Notepad2 is also based on the Scintilla editing engine, but it’s much simpler than Notepad++. It bills itself as being fast, light-weight, and Notepad-like. Crimson Editor Free Crimson Editor has the ability to edit remote files, using a built-in FTP client; there’s also a spell checker. TotalEdit Free TotalEdit allows file comparison, RegEx search and replace, and has multiple options for file backup / versioning. For cleanup, it offers (X)HTML and XML customizable formatting, and a spell checker. In-Type Free ConTEXT Free SourceEdit Free SourceEdit includes features such as clipboard history, syntax highlighting and autocompletion for a decent set of languages. A hex editor and FTP client. RJ TextED Free RJ TextED supports integration with TopStyle Lite. Provides HTML validation and formatting. It includes an FTP client, a file browser, and a code browser, as well as a character map and support for email. GEDIT Free It is one of the best coda alternatives for windows and Linux. It has syntax highlighting and is best suitable for programming. It has many attractive features such as full support for UTF-8, undo/redo, and clipboard support, search and replace, configurable syntax highlighting for various languages and many more supportive features. It is extensible with plug ins. Other important coda alternatives for windows and Linux are Redcar, Bluefish Editor, NVU, Ruby Mine, Slick Edit, Geany, Editra, txt2html and CSSED. There are many more. Its up to user to decide which one suits best to his requirements. Related posts:10 Useful Text Editor For Developer Applications to Install & Run Windows on Linux Open Source WYSIWYG Text Editors

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• Windows 8.1 Will Start Encrypting Hard Drives By Default: Everything You Need to Know

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Windows 8.1 will automatically encrypt the storage on modern Windows PCs. This will help protect your files in case someone steals your laptop and tries to get at them, but it has important ramifications for data recovery. Previously, “BitLocker” was available on Professional and Enterprise editions of Windows, while “Device Encryption” was available on Windows RT and Windows Phone. Device encryption is included with all editions of Windows 8.1 — and it’s on by default. When Your Hard Drive Will Be Encrypted Windows 8.1 includes “Pervasive Device Encryption.” This works a bit differently from the standard BitLocker feature that has been included in Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions of Windows for the past few versions. Before Windows 8.1 automatically enables Device Encryption, the following must be true: The Windows device “must support connected standby and meet the Windows Hardware Certification Kit (HCK) requirements for TPM and SecureBoot on ConnectedStandby systems.”  (Source) Older Windows PCs won’t support this feature, while new Windows 8.1 devices you pick up will have this feature enabled by default. When Windows 8.1 installs cleanly and the computer is prepared, device encryption is “initialized” on the system drive and other internal drives. Windows uses a clear key at this point, which is removed later when the recovery key is successfully backed up. The PC’s user must log in with a Microsoft account with administrator privileges or join the PC to a domain. If a Microsoft account is used, a recovery key will be backed up to Microsoft’s servers and encryption will be enabled. If a domain account is used, a recovery key will be backed up to Active Directory Domain Services and encryption will be enabled. If you have an older Windows computer that you’ve upgraded to Windows 8.1, it may not support Device Encryption. If you log in with a local user account, Device Encryption won’t be enabled. If you upgrade your Windows 8 device to Windows 8.1, you’ll need to enable device encryption, as it’s off by default when upgrading. Recovering An Encrypted Hard Drive Device encryption means that a thief can’t just pick up your laptop, insert a Linux live CD or Windows installer disc, and boot the alternate operating system to view your files without knowing your Windows password. It means that no one can just pull the hard drive from your device, connect the hard drive to another computer, and view the files. We’ve previously explained that your Windows password doesn’t actually secure your files. With Windows 8.1, average Windows users will finally be protected with encryption by default. However, there’s a problem — if you forget your password and are unable to log in, you’d also be unable to recover your files. This is likely why encryption is only enabled when a user logs in with a Microsoft account (or connects to a domain). Microsoft holds a recovery key, so you can gain access to your files by going through a recovery process. As long as you’re able to authenticate using your Microsoft account credentials — for example, by receiving an SMS message on the cell phone number connected to your Microsoft account — you’ll be able to recover your encrypted data. With Windows 8.1, it’s more important than ever to configure your Microsoft account’s security settings and recovery methods so you’ll be able to recover your files if you ever get locked out of your Microsoft account. Microsoft does hold the recovery key and would be capable of providing it to law enforcement if it was requested, which is certainly a legitimate concern in the age of PRISM. However, this encryption still provides protection from thieves picking up your hard drive and digging through your personal or business files. If you’re worried about a government or a determined thief who’s capable of gaining access to your Microsoft account, you’ll want to encrypt your hard drive with software that doesn’t upload a copy of your recovery key to the Internet, such as TrueCrypt. How to Disable Device Encryption There should be no real reason to disable device encryption. If nothing else, it’s a useful feature that will hopefully protect sensitive data in the real world where people — and even businesses — don’t enable encryption on their own. As encryption is only enabled on devices with the appropriate hardware and will be enabled by default, Microsoft has hopefully ensured that users won’t see noticeable slow-downs in performance. Encryption adds some overhead, but the overhead can hopefully be handled by dedicated hardware. If you’d like to enable a different encryption solution or just disable encryption entirely, you can control this yourself. To do so, open the PC settings app — swipe in from the right edge of the screen or press Windows Key + C, click the Settings icon, and select Change PC settings. Navigate to PC and devices -> PC info. At the bottom of the PC info pane, you’ll see a Device Encryption section. Select Turn Off if you want to disable device encryption, or select Turn On if you want to enable it — users upgrading from Windows 8 will have to enable it manually in this way. Note that Device Encryption can’t be disabled on Windows RT devices, such as Microsoft’s Surface RT and Surface 2. If you don’t see the Device Encryption section in this window, you’re likely using an older device that doesn’t meet the requirements and thus doesn’t support Device Encryption. For example, our Windows 8.1 virtual machine doesn’t offer Device Encryption configuration options. This is the new normal for Windows PCs, tablets, and devices in general. Where files on typical PCs were once ripe for easy access by thieves, Windows PCs are now encrypted by default and recovery keys are sent to Microsoft’s servers for safe keeping. This last part may be a bit creepy, but it’s easy to imagine average users forgetting their passwords — they’d be very upset if they lost all their files because they had to reset their passwords. It’s also an improvement over Windows PCs being completely unprotected by default.     

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• Week in Geek: IPv6 Capable Smartphones Compromise User Privacy Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to “clone a disk, resize static windows, and create system function shortcuts”, use 45 different services, sites, and apps to help read favorite sites, add MP3 support to Audacity (for saving in MP3 format), install a Wii game loader for easy backups and fast load times, create a Blue Screen of Death in any color, and more. Photo by legofenris. Weekly News Links Photo by The H Security. IPv6: Smartphones compromise users’ privacy Since version 4 of the iOS operating system, Apple’s iPhones, iPads and iPods have been capable of handling IPv6, and most Android devices have been capable since version 2.1. However, the operating systems transfer an ID that discloses information about their users. Dumb phones can be attacked too Much of the discussion of security threats to mobile phones revolves around smartphones, but researchers have found that less advanced “feature phones,” still used by the majority of people around the world, also are vulnerable to attack. SCADA exploit – the dragon awakes The recent publication of an exploit for KingView, a software package for visualising industrial process control systems, appears to be having an effect. Threatpost reports that both the Chinese vendor Wellintech and Chinese CERT (CN-CERT) have now reacted. Sophos: Spam to get more malicious Spam is becoming more malicious in nature as trickery tactics change in line with current user interests, according to a new report released Tuesday by Sophos. Global spam traffic rebounds as Rustock wakes Spam is on the rise after the Rustock botnet awoke from its Christmas slumber, according to Symantec. Cracking WPA keys in the cloud At the forthcoming Black Hat conference, blogger Thomas Roth plans to demonstrate how weak WPA PSKs can be cracked quickly and easily using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Microsoft Security Advisory: Vulnerability in Internet Explorer could allow remote code execution Provides a link to more details about the vulnerability and shows a work-around/fix for the problem. Adobe plans to make it easier to delete Flash cookies in web browsers The new API, NPAPI:ClearSiteData, will allow Flash cookies – also known as Local Shared Objects (LSO) – to be deleted directly in the browser’s settings. Firefox beta getting new database standard The ninth beta version of Firefox is set to get support for a standard called IndexedDB that provides a database interface useful for offline data storage and other tasks needing information on a browser’s computer. MetroPCS accused of blocking certain Net content MetroPCS is violating the FCC’s recently approved Net neutrality rules by blocking certain Internet content, say several public interest groups. Server and Tools chief Muglia to leave Microsoft in summer 2011 Microsoft veteran and Server & Tools Business (STB) President Bob Muglia is leaving Microsoft, according to an email that CEO Steve Ballmer sent to employees on January 10. Report: DOJ nearing decision on Google-ITA The U.S. Department of Justice is gearing up for a possible formal antitrust investigation into whether or not Google should be allowed to purchase travel software company ITA Software, according to a report. South Korea says Google Street View broke law Police in South Korea reportedly say Google broke the country’s law when its Street View service captured personal data from unsecure Wi-Fi networks. The backlash over Google’s HTML5 video bet Choosing strategies based on what you believe to be long-term benefits is generally a good idea when running a business, but if you manage to alienate the world in the process, the long term may become irrelevant. Google answers critics on HTML5 Web video move Google responded to critics of its decision to drop support for a popular HTML5 video codec by declaring that a royalty-supported standard for Web video will hold the Web hostage. Random TinyHacker Links A Special GiveAway: a Great Book & Great Security Software The team from 7 Tutorials has a special giveaway running during the month of January. Signed copies of their latest book, full 1-year licenses of BitDefender Internet Security 2011 and free 3-month trials for everyone willing to participate. One Click Rooting For Android Phones Here’s a nice tool that helps you root your Android phone effortlessly. New Angry Birds Free version 1.0 Available in the App Store. Google Code University Learn programming at Google Code University. Capture and Share Your Favorite Part Of a YouTube Video SnipSnip.it lets you share only the part of the video that you like. Super User Questions More great questions and answers from this past week’s popular topics at Super User. What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for? Does OS X support linux-like features? What is the easiest way to make a backup of an entire hard disk? Will shifting from Wireless to Wired network result in better performance? Is it legal to install Windows 7 Home Premium Retail inside VMware virtual machine? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Enjoy reading through our hottest articles from this past week. The 50 Best Ways to Disable Built-in Windows Features You Don’t Want The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal One Year Ago on How-To Geek More great articles from one year ago filled with helpful geeky goodness for you to enjoy. Share Text & Images the Easy Way with JustPaste.it Start Portable Firefox in Safe Mode Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate Available, Here’s How to Fix Your Incompatible Extensions Protect Your Computer from “Little Hands” with KidSafe Lock Prying Eyes Out of Your Minimized Windows Custom Crocheted Cylon-Cthulhu Hybrid What happens when you let your Cylon Centurion figure and your crocheted Cthulhu spend too many lonely nights together? A Cylon-Cthulhu hybrid, of course! You can get your own from the Cthulhu Chick store over on Etsy. Note: This is not an ad…Ruth is a friend of ours, and this Cylon-Cthulhu hybrid makes the perfect guard for the new MVP trophy in our office. The Geek Note Whether it is a geeky indoor project or just getting outside, we hope that you and your families have a terrific fun-filled weekend! Remember to keep sending those great tips in to us at [email protected]. Photo by qwrrty. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 Available for Download – Get Your Copy Now The Frustrations of a Computer Literate Watching a Newbie Use a Computer [Humorous Video] Season0nPass Jailbreaks Current Gen Apple TVs IBM’s Jeopardy Playing Computer Watson Shows The Pros How It’s Done [Video] Tranquil Juice Drop Abstract Wallpaper Pulse Is a Sleek Newsreader for iOS and Android Devices

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• Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine

  - by danx

  Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine Cryptography is a major component of secure e-commerce. Since cryptography is compute intensive and adds a significant load to applications, such as SSL web servers (https), crypto performance is an important factor. Providing accelerated crypto hardware greatly helps these applications and will help lead to a wider adoption of cryptography, and lower cost, in e-commerce and other applications. The Intel Westmere microprocessor has six new instructions to acclerate AES encryption. They are called "AESNI" for "AES New Instructions". These are unprivileged instructions, so no "root", other elevated access, or context switch is required to execute these instructions. These instructions are used in a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine available in Solaris 11, the aesni engine. Previous Work Previously, AESNI instructions were introduced into the Solaris x86 kernel and libraries. That is, the "aes" kernel module (used by IPsec and other kernel modules) and the Solaris pkcs11 library (for user applications). These are available in Solaris 10 10/09 (update 8) and above, and Solaris 11. The work here is to add the aesni engine to OpenSSL. X86 AESNI Instructions Intel's Xeon 5600 is one of the processors that support AESNI. This processor is used in the Sun Fire X4170 M2 As mentioned above, six new instructions acclerate AES encryption in processor silicon. The new instructions are: aesenc performs one round of AES encryption. One encryption round is composed of these steps: substitute bytes, shift rows, mix columns, and xor the round key. aesenclast performs the final encryption round, which is the same as above, except omitting the mix columns (which is only needed for the next encryption round). aesdec performs one round of AES decryption aesdeclast performs the final AES decryption round aeskeygenassist Helps expand the user-provided key into a "key schedule" of keys, one per round aesimc performs an "inverse mixed columns" operation to convert the encryption key schedule into a decryption key schedule pclmulqdq Not a AESNI instruction, but performs "carryless multiply" operations to acclerate AES GCM mode. Since the AESNI instructions are implemented in hardware, they take a constant number of cycles and are not vulnerable to side-channel timing attacks that attempt to discern some bits of data from the time taken to encrypt or decrypt the data. Solaris x86 and OpenSSL Software Optimizations Having X86 AESNI hardware crypto instructions is all well and good, but how do we access it? The software is available with Solaris 11 and is used automatically if you are running Solaris x86 on a AESNI-capable processor. AESNI is used internally in the kernel through kernel crypto modules and is available in user space through the PKCS#11 library. For OpenSSL on Solaris 11, AESNI crypto is available directly with a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine, called the "aesni engine." This is in lieu of the extra overhead of going through the Solaris OpenSSL pkcs11 engine, which accesses Solaris crypto and digest operations. Instead, AESNI assembly is included directly in the new aesni engine. Instead of including the aesni engine in a separate library in /lib/openssl/engines/, the aesni engine is "built-in", meaning it is included directly in OpenSSL's libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library. This reduces overhead and the need to manually specify the aesni engine. Since the engine is built-in (that is, in libcrypto.so.1.0.0), the openssl -engine command line flag or API call is not needed to access the engine—the aesni engine is used automatically on AESNI hardware. Ciphers and Digests supported by OpenSSL aesni engine The Openssl aesni engine auto-detects if it's running on AESNI hardware and uses AESNI encryption instructions for these ciphers: AES-128-CBC, AES-192-CBC, AES-256-CBC, AES-128-CFB128, AES-192-CFB128, AES-256-CFB128, AES-128-CTR, AES-192-CTR, AES-256-CTR, AES-128-ECB, AES-192-ECB, AES-256-ECB, AES-128-OFB, AES-192-OFB, and AES-256-OFB. Implementation of the OpenSSL aesni engine The AESNI assembly language routines are not a part of the regular Openssl 1.0.0 release. AESNI is a part of the "HEAD" ("development" or "unstable") branch of OpenSSL, for future release. But AESNI is also available as a separate patch provided by Intel to the OpenSSL project for OpenSSL 1.0.0. A minimal amount of "glue" code in the aesni engine works between the OpenSSL libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library and the assembly functions. The aesni engine code is separate from the base OpenSSL code and requires patching only a few source files to use it. That means OpenSSL can be more easily updated to future versions without losing the performance from the built-in aesni engine. OpenSSL aesni engine Performance Here's some graphs of aesni engine performance I measured by running openssl speed -evp $algorithm where $algorithm is aes-128-cbc, aes-192-cbc, and aes-256-cbc. These are using the 64-bit version of openssl on the same AESNI hardware, a Sun Fire X4170 M2 with a Intel Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz, running Solaris 11 FCS. "Before" is openssl without the aesni engine and "after" is openssl with the aesni engine. The numbers are MBytes/second. OpenSSL aesni engine performance on Sun Fire X4170 M2 (Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz) (Higher is better; "before"=OpenSSL on AESNI without AESNI engine software, "after"=OpenSSL AESNI engine) As you can see the speedup is dramatic for all 3 key lengths and for data sizes from 16 bytes to 8 Kbytes—AESNI is about 7.5-8x faster over hand-coded amd64 assembly (without aesni instructions). Verifying the OpenSSL aesni engine is present The easiest way to determine if you are running the aesni engine is to type "openssl engine" on the command line. No configuration, API, or command line options are needed to use the OpenSSL aesni engine. If you are running on Intel AESNI hardware with Solaris 11 FCS, you'll see this output indicating you are using the aesni engine: intel-westmere $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support If you are running on Intel without AESNI hardware you'll see this output indicating the hardware can't support the aesni engine: intel-nehalem $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support For Solaris on SPARC or older Solaris OpenSSL software, you won't see any aesni engine line at all. Third-party OpenSSL software (built yourself or from outside Oracle) will not have the aesni engine either. Solaris 11 FCS comes with OpenSSL version 1.0.0e. The output of typing "openssl version" should be "OpenSSL 1.0.0e 6 Sep 2011". 64- and 32-bit OpenSSL OpenSSL comes in both 32- and 64-bit binaries. 64-bit executable is now the default, at /usr/bin/openssl, and OpenSSL 64-bit libraries at /lib/amd64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0 The 32-bit executable is at /usr/bin/i86/openssl and the libraries are at /lib/libcrytpo.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0. Availability The OpenSSL AESNI engine is available in Solaris 11 x86 for both the 64- and 32-bit versions of OpenSSL. It is not available with Solaris 10. You must have a processor that supports AESNI instructions, otherwise OpenSSL will fallback to the older, slower AES implementation without AESNI. Processors that support AESNI include most Westmere and Sandy Bridge class processor architectures. Some low-end processors (such as for mobile/laptop platforms) do not support AESNI. The easiest way to determine if the processor supports AESNI is with the isainfo -v command—look for "amd64" and "aes" in the output: $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu Conclusion The Solaris 11 OpenSSL aesni engine provides easy access to powerful Intel AESNI hardware cryptography, in addition to Solaris userland PKCS#11 libraries and Solaris crypto kernel modules.

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• Process.Start() and ShellExecute() fails with URLs on Windows 8

  - by Rick Strahl

  Since I installed Windows 8 I've noticed that a number of my applications appear to have problems opening URLs. That is when I click on a link inside of a Windows application, either nothing happens or there's an error that occurs. It's happening both to my own applications and a host of Windows applications I'm running. At first I thought this was an issue with my default browser (Chrome) but after switching the default browser to a few others and experimenting a bit I noticed that the errors occur - oddly enough - only when I run an application as an Administrator. I also tried switching to FireFox and Opera as my default browser and saw exactly the same behavior. The scenario for this is a bit bizarre: Running on Windows 8 Call Process.Start() (or ShellExecute() in Win32 API) with a URL or an HTML file Run 'As Administrator' (works fine under non-elevated user account!) or with UAC off A browser other than Internet Explorer is set as your Default Web Browser Talk about a weird scenario: Something that doesn't work when you run as an Administrator which is supposed to have rights to everything on the system! Instead running under an Admin account - either elevated with a User Account Control prompt or even when running as a full Administrator fails. It appears that this problem does not occur for everyone, but when I looked for a solution to this, I saw quite a few posts in relation to this with no clear resolutions. I have three Windows 8 machines running here in the office and all three of them showed this behavior. Lest you think this is just a programmer's problem - this can affect any software running on your system that needs to run under administrative rights. Try it out Now, in order for this next example to fail, any browser but Internet Explorer has to be your default browser and even then it may not fail depending on how you installed your browser. To see if this is a problem create a small Console application and call Process.Start() with a URL in it:namespace Win8ShellBugConsole { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Launching Url..."); Process.Start("http://microsoft.com"); Console.Write("Press any key to continue..."); Console.ReadKey(); Console.WriteLine("\r\n\r\nLaunching image..."); Process.Start(Path.GetFullPath(@"..\..\sailbig.jpg")); Console.Write("Press any key to continue..."); Console.ReadKey(); } } } Compile this code. Then execute the code from Explorer (not from Visual Studio because that may change the permissions). If you simply run the EXE and you're not running as an administrator, you'll see the Web page pop up in the browser as well as the image loading. Now run the same thing with Run As Administrator: Now when you run it you get a nice error when Process.Start() is fired: The same happens if you are running with User Account Control off altogether - ie. you are running as a full admin account. Now if you comment out the URL in the code above and just fire the image display - that works just fine in any user mode. As does opening any other local file type or even starting a new EXE locally (ie. Process.Start("c:\windows\notepad.exe"). All that works, EXCEPT for URLs. The code above uses Process.Start() in .NET but the same happens in Win32 Applications that use the ShellExecute API. In some of my older Fox apps ShellExecute returns an error code of 31 - which is No Shell Association found. What's the Deal? It turns out the problem has to do with the way browsers are registering themselves on Windows. Internet Explorer - being a built-in application in Windows 8 - apparently does this correctly, but other browsers possibly don't or at least didn't at the time I installed them. So even Chrome, which continually updates itself, has a recent version that apparently has this registration issue fixed, I was unable to simply set IE as my default browser then use Chrome to 'Set as Default Browser'. It still didn't work. Neither did using the Set Program Associations dialog which lets you assign what extensions are mapped to by a given application. Each application provides a set of extension/moniker mappings that it supports and this dialog lets you associate them on a system wide basis. This also did not work for Chrome or any of the other browsers at first. However, after repeated retries here eventually I did manage to get FireFox to work, but not any of the others. What Works? Reinstall the Browser In the end I decided on the hard core pull the plug solution: Totally uninstall and re-install Chrome in this case. And lo and behold, after reinstall everything was working fine. Now even removing the association for Chrome, switching to IE as the default browser and then back to Chrome works. But, even though the version of Chrome I was running before uninstalling and reinstalling is the same as I'm running now after the reinstall now it works. Of course I had to find out the hard way, before Richard commented with a note regarding what the issue is with Chrome at least: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=156400 As expected the issue is a registration issue - with keys not being registered at the machine level. Reading this I'm still not sure why this should be a problem - an elevated account still runs under the same user account (ie. I'm still rickstrahl even if I Run As Administrator), so why shouldn't an app be able to read my Current User registry hive? And also that doesn't quite explain why if I register the extensions using Run As Administrator in Chrome when using Set as Default Browser). But in the end it works… Not so fast It's now a couple of days later and still there are some oddball problems although this time they appear to be purely Chrome issues. After the reinstall Chrome seems to pop up properly with ShellExecute() calls both in regular user and Admin mode. However, it now looks like Chrome is actually running two completely separate user profiles for each. For example, when I run Visual Studio in Admin mode and go to View in browser, Chrome complains that it was installed in Admin mode and can't launch (WTF?). Then you retry a few times later and it ends up working. When launched that way some of the plug-ins installed don't show up with the effect that sometimes they're visible sometimes they're not. Also Chrome seems to loose my configuration and Google sign in between sessions now, presumably when switching user modes. Add-ins installed in admin mode don't show up in user mode and vice versa. Ah, this is lovely. Did I mention that I freaking hate UAC precisely because of this kind of bullshit. You can never tell exactly what account your app is running under, and apparently apps also have a hard time trying to put data into the right place that works for both scenarios. And as my recent post on using Windows Live accounts shows it's yet another level of abstraction ontop of the underlying system identity that can cause all sort of small side effect headaches like this. Hopefully, most of you are skirting this issue altogether - having installed more recent versions of your favorite browsers. If not, hopefully this post will take you straight to reinstallation to fix this annoying issue.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Windows  .NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Use Autoruns to Manually Clean an Infected PC

  - by Mark Virtue

  There are many anti-malware programs out there that will clean your system of nasties, but what happens if you’re not able to use such a program?  Autoruns, from SysInternals (recently acquired by Microsoft), is indispensable when removing malware manually. There are a few reasons why you may need to remove viruses and spyware manually: Perhaps you can’t abide running resource-hungry and invasive anti-malware programs on your PC You might need to clean your mom’s computer (or someone else who doesn’t understand that a big flashing sign on a website that says “Your computer is infected with a virus – click HERE to remove it” is not a message that can necessarily be trusted) The malware is so aggressive that it resists all attempts to automatically remove it, or won’t even allow you to install anti-malware software Part of your geek credo is the belief that anti-spyware utilities are for wimps Autoruns is an invaluable addition to any geek’s software toolkit.  It allows you to track and control all programs (and program components) that start automatically with Windows (or with Internet Explorer).  Virtually all malware is designed to start automatically, so there’s a very strong chance that it can be detected and removed with the help of Autoruns. We have covered how to use Autoruns in an earlier article, which you should read if you need to first familiarize yourself with the program. Autoruns is a standalone utility that does not need to be installed on your computer.  It can be simply downloaded, unzipped and run (link below).  This makes is ideally suited for adding to your portable utility collection on your flash drive. When you start Autoruns for the first time on a computer, you are presented with the license agreement: After agreeing to the terms, the main Autoruns window opens, showing you the complete list of all software that will run when your computer starts, when you log in, or when you open Internet Explorer: To temporarily disable a program from launching, uncheck the box next to it’s entry.  Note:  This does not terminate the program if it is running at the time – it merely prevents it from starting next time.  To permanently prevent a program from launching, delete the entry altogether (use the Delete key, or right-click and choose Delete from the context-menu)).  Note:  This does not remove the program from your computer – to remove it completely you need to uninstall the program (or otherwise delete it from your hard disk). Suspicious Software It can take a fair bit of experience (read “trial and error”) to become adept at identifying what is malware and what is not.  Most of the entries presented in Autoruns are legitimate programs, even if their names are unfamiliar to you.  Here are some tips to help you differentiate the malware from the legitimate software: If an entry is digitally signed by a software publisher (i.e. there’s an entry in the Publisher column) or has a “Description”, then there’s a good chance that it’s legitimate If you recognize the software’s name, then it’s usually okay.  Note that occasionally malware will “impersonate” legitimate software, but adopting a name that’s identical or similar to software you’re familiar with (e.g. “AcrobatLauncher” or “PhotoshopBrowser”).  Also, be aware that many malware programs adopt generic or innocuous-sounding names, such as “Diskfix” or “SearchHelper” (both mentioned below). Malware entries usually appear on the Logon tab of Autoruns (but not always!) If you open up the folder that contains the EXE or DLL file (more on this below), an examine the “last modified” date, the dates are often from the last few days (assuming that your infection is fairly recent) Malware is often located in the C:\Windows folder or the C:\Windows\System32 folder Malware often only has a generic icon (to the left of the name of the entry) If in doubt, right-click the entry and select Search Online… The list below shows two suspicious looking entries:  Diskfix and SearchHelper These entries, highlighted above, are fairly typical of malware infections: They have neither descriptions nor publishers They have generic names The files are located in C:\Windows\System32 They have generic icons The filenames are random strings of characters If you look in the C:\Windows\System32 folder and locate the files, you’ll see that they are some of the most recently modified files in the folder (see below) Double-clicking on the items will take you to their corresponding registry keys: Removing the Malware Once you’ve identified the entries you believe to be suspicious, you now need to decide what you want to do with them.  Your choices include: Temporarily disable the Autorun entry Permanently delete the Autorun entry Locate the running process (using Task Manager or similar) and terminating it Delete the EXE or DLL file from your disk (or at least move it to a folder where it won’t be automatically started) or all of the above, depending upon how certain you are that the program is malware. To see if your changes succeeded, you will need to reboot your machine, and check any or all of the following: Autoruns – to see if the entry has returned Task Manager (or similar) – to see if the program was started again after the reboot Check the behavior that led you to believe that your PC was infected in the first place.  If it’s no longer happening, chances are that your PC is now clean Conclusion This solution isn’t for everyone and is most likely geared to advanced users. Usually using a quality Antivirus application does the trick, but if not Autoruns is a valuable tool in your Anti-Malware kit. Keep in mind that some malware is harder to remove than others.  Sometimes you need several iterations of the steps above, with each iteration requiring you to look more carefully at each Autorun entry.  Sometimes the instant that you remove the Autorun entry, the malware that is running replaces the entry.  When this happens, we need to become more aggressive in our assassination of the malware, including terminating programs (even legitimate programs like Explorer.exe) that are infected with malware DLLs. Shortly we will be publishing an article on how to identify, locate and terminate processes that represent legitimate programs but are running infected DLLs, in order that those DLLs can be deleted from the system. Download Autoruns from SysInternals Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Autoruns Tool to Track Startup Applications and Add-onsHow To Get Detailed Information About Your PCSUPERAntiSpyware Portable is the Must-Have Spyware Removal Tool You NeedQuick Tip: Windows Vista Temp Files DirectoryClear Recent Commands From the Run Dialog in Windows XP TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more Download Microsoft Office Help tab

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• How to Export Multiple Contacts in Outlook 2013 to Multiple vCards or a Single vCard

  - by Lori Kaufman

  We’ve shown you how to export a contact to and import a contact from a vCard (.vcf) file. However, what if you want to export multiple contacts at the same time to multiple vCard files or even a single vCard file? Outlook doesn’t allow you to directly export all your contacts as vCard files or as a single vCard file, but there is a way to accomplish both tasks. Export Multiple Contacts to Multiple vCard Files Outlook allows you to forward contact information as a vCard. You can also select multiple contacts and forward them all at once. This feature allows you to indirectly export multiple contacts at once to multiple vCard files. Click the People tab to access your contacts. Select all the contacts you want to export using the Shift and Ctrl keys as needed. Select Contacts the same way you would select files in Windows Explorer. Click Forward Contact in the Share section on the Home tab and select As a Business Card from the drop-down menu. The selected contacts attached to a new email message as .vcf files. To select all the attached .vcf files, right-click in the Attached box and select Select All from the popup menu. Make sure the folder to which you want to export the contacts is open in Windows Explorer. Drag the selected attached .vcf files from the new email message to the open folder in Windows Explorer. A .vcf file is created for each contact you selected and dragged to the folder. You can close the Message window by clicking on the X in the upper, right corner of the window. NOTE: You can also close the Message window by clicking the File tab. Then, click the Close option on the left. Because you already have your .vcf files, you don’t need to save or send the message, so click No when asked if you want to save your changes. If it turns out that a draft of your message was saved, the following message displays. Click No to delete the draft. Export Multiple Contacts to a Single vCard (.vcf) File If you would rather export your contacts to a single vCard (.vcf) File, there is a way to do this using Gmail. We’ll export the contacts from Outlook as a .csv file and then use Gmail to convert the .csv file to a .vcf file. Select the contacts you want to export on the People page and click the File tab. On the Account Information screen, click Open & Export in the list on the left. On the Open screen, click Import/Export. The Import and Export Wizard displays. Select Export to a file from the Choose an action to perform list and click Next. In the Create a file of type box, select Comma Separated Values. Click Next. Contacts should be already selected in the Select folder to export from box. If not, select it. Click Next. Click Browse to the right of the Save exported file as box. Navigate to the folder to which you want to export the .csv file. Enter a name for the file in the File name edit box, keeping the .csv extension. The path you selected is entered into the Save exported file as edit box. Click Next. The final screen of the Export to a File dialog box displays listing the action to be performed. Click Finish to begin the export process. Once the export process is finished, you will see the .csv file in the folder in Windows Explorer. Now, we will import the .csv file into Gmail. Go to Gmail and sign in to your account. Click Gmal in the upper, left corner of the main page and select Contacts from the drop-down menu. On the Contacts page, click More above your list of contacts and select Import from the drop-down menu. Click Browse on the Import contacts dialog box that displays. Navigate to the folder in which you saved the .csv file and select the file. Click Open. Click Import on the Import contacts dialog box. A screen displays listing the contacts you imported, but not yet merged into your main Gmail contacts list. Select the contacts you imported. NOTE: The contacts you imported may be the only contacts in this list. If that’s the case, they all should be automatically selected. Click More and select Export from the drop-down menu. On the Export contacts dialog box, select Selected contacts to indicate which contacts you want to export. NOTE: We could have selected The group Imported 10/10/13 because that contains the same two contacts as the Selected contacts. Select vCard format for the export format. Click Export. Gmail creates a contacts.vcf file containing the selected contacts and asks you whether you want to open the file with Outlook or save the file. To save the file, select the Save File option and click OK. Navigate to the folder in which you want to save the contacts.vcf file, change the name of the file in the File name edit box, if desired, and click Save. The .vcf file is saved to the selected directory and contains all the contacts you exported from Outlook. This could be used as a way to backup your contacts in one file. You could also backup the .csv file. However, if you have a lot of contacts you will probably find that the .vcf file is smaller. We only exported two contacts, and our .csv file was 2 KB, while the .vcf file was 1 KB. We will be showing you how to import multiple contacts from a single .vcf file into Outlook soon.     

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• Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service

  - by Elton Stoneman

  We're in the process of delivering an enabling project to expose on-premise WCF services securely to Internet consumers. The Azure Service Bus Relay is doing the clever stuff, we register our on-premise service with Azure, consumers call into our .servicebus.windows.net namespace, and their requests are relayed and serviced on-premise. In theory it's all wonderfully simple; by using the relay we get lots of protocol options, free HTTPS and load balancing, and by integrating to ACS we get plenty of security options. Part of our delivery is a suite of sample consumers for the service - .NET, jQuery, PHP - and this set of posts will cover setting up the service and the consumers. Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service In theory, this is ultra-straightforward. In practice, and on a dev laptop it is - but in a corporate network with firewalls and proxies, it isn't, so we'll walkthrough some of the pitfalls. Note that I'm using the "old" Azure portal which will soon be out of date, but the new shiny portal should have the same steps available and be easier to use. We start with a simple WCF service which takes a string as input, reverses the string and returns it. The Part 1 version of the code is on GitHub here: on GitHub here: IPASBR Part 1. Configuring Azure Service Bus Start by logging into the Azure portal and registering a Service Bus namespace which will be our endpoint in the cloud. Give it a globally unique name, set it up somewhere near you (if you’re in Europe, remember Europe (North) is Ireland, and Europe (West) is the Netherlands), and  enable ACS integration by ticking "Access Control" as a service: Authenticating and authorizing to ACS When we try to register our on-premise service as a listener for the Service Bus endpoint, we need to supply credentials, which means only trusted service providers can act as listeners. We can use the default "owner" credentials, but that has admin permissions so a dedicated service account is better (Neil Mackenzie has a good post On Not Using owner with the Azure AppFabric Service Bus with lots of permission details). Click on "Access Control Service" for the namespace, navigate to Service Identities and add a new one. Give the new account a sensible name and description: Let ACS generate a symmetric key for you (this will be the shared secret we use in the on-premise service to authenticate as a listener), but be sure to set the expiration date to something usable. The portal defaults to expiring new identities after 1 year - but when your year is up *your identity will expire without warning* and everything will stop working. In production, you'll need governance to manage identity expiration and a process to make sure you renew identities and roll new keys regularly. The new service identity needs to be authorized to listen on the service bus endpoint. This is done through claim mapping in ACS - we'll set up a rule that says if the nameidentifier in the input claims has the value serviceProvider, in the output we'll have an action claim with the value Listen. In the ACS portal you'll see that there is already a Relying Party Application set up for ServiceBus, which has a Default rule group. Edit the rule group and click Add to add this new rule: The values to use are: Issuer: Access Control Service Input claim type: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier Input claim value: serviceProvider Output claim type: net.windows.servicebus.action Output claim value: Listen When your service namespace and identity are set up, open the Part 1 solution and put your own namespace, service identity name and secret key into the file AzureConnectionDetails.xml in Solution Items, e.g: <azure namespace="sixeyed-ipasbr">    <!-- ACS credentials for the listening service (Part1):-->   <service identityName="serviceProvider"            symmetricKey="nuR2tHhlrTCqf4YwjT2RA2BZ/+xa23euaRJNLh1a/V4="/>  </azure> Build the solution, and the T4 template will generate the Web.config for the service project with your Azure details in the transportClientEndpointBehavior:           <behavior name="SharedSecret">             <transportClientEndpointBehavior credentialType="SharedSecret">               <clientCredentials>                 <sharedSecret issuerName="serviceProvider"                               issuerSecret="nuR2tHhlrTCqf4YwjT2RA2BZ/+xa23euaRJNLh1a/V4="/>               </clientCredentials>             </transportClientEndpointBehavior>           </behavior> , and your service namespace in the Azure endpoint:         <!-- Azure Service Bus endpoints -->          <endpoint address="sb://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/net"                   binding="netTcpRelayBinding"                   contract="Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services.IFormatService"                   behaviorConfiguration="SharedSecret">         </endpoint> The sample project is hosted in IIS, but it won't register with Azure until the service is activated. Typically you'd install AppFabric 1.1 for Widnows Server and set the service to auto-start in IIS, but for dev just navigate to the local REST URL, which will activate the service and register it with Azure. Testing the service locally As well as an Azure endpoint, the service has a WebHttpBinding for local REST access:         <!-- local REST endpoint for internal use -->         <endpoint address="rest"                   binding="webHttpBinding"                   behaviorConfiguration="RESTBehavior"                   contract="Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services.IFormatService" /> Build the service, then navigate to: http://localhost/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services/FormatService.svc/rest/reverse?string=abc123 - and you should see the reversed string response: If your network allows it, you'll get the expected response as before, but in the background your service will also be listening in the cloud. Good stuff! Who needs network security? Onto the next post for consuming the service with the netTcpRelayBinding.  Setting up network access to Azure But, if you get an error, it's because your network is secured and it's doing something to stop the relay working. The Service Bus relay bindings try to use direct TCP connections to Azure, so if ports 9350-9354 are available *outbound*, then the relay will run through them. If not, the binding steps down to standard HTTP, and issues a CONNECT across port 443 or 80 to set up a tunnel for the relay. If your network security guys are doing their job, the first option will be blocked by the firewall, and the second option will be blocked by the proxy, so you'll get this error: System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException: Unable to reach sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net via TCP (9351, 9352) or HTTP (80, 443) - and that will probably be the start of lots of discussions. Network guys don't really like giving servers special permissions for the web proxy, and they really don't like opening ports, so they'll need to be convinced about this. The resolution in our case was to put up a dedicated box in a DMZ, tinker with the firewall and the proxy until we got a relay connection working, then run some traffic which the the network guys monitored to do a security assessment afterwards. Along the way we hit a few more issues, diagnosed mainly with Fiddler and Wireshark: System.Net.ProtocolViolationException: Chunked encoding upload is not supported on the HTTP/1.0 protocol - this means the TCP ports are not available, so Azure tries to relay messaging traffic across HTTP. The service can access the endpoint, but the proxy is downgrading traffic to HTTP 1.0, which does not support tunneling, so Azure can’t make its connection. We were using the Squid proxy, version 2.6. The Squid project is incrementally adding HTTP 1.1 support, but there's no definitive list of what's supported in what version (here are some hints). System.ServiceModel.Security.SecurityNegotiationException: The X.509 certificate CN=servicebus.windows.net chain building failed. The certificate that was used has a trust chain that cannot be verified. Replace the certificate or change the certificateValidationMode. The evocation function was unable to check revocation because the revocation server was offline. - by this point we'd given up on the HTTP proxy and opened the TCP ports. We got this error when the relay binding does it's authentication hop to ACS. The messaging traffic is TCP, but the control traffic still goes over HTTP, and as part of the ACS authentication the process checks with a revocation server to see if Microsoft’s ACS cert is still valid, so the proxy still needs some clearance. The service account (the IIS app pool identity) needs access to: www.public-trust.com mscrl.microsoft.com We still got this error periodically with different accounts running the app pool. We fixed that by ensuring the machine-wide proxy settings are set up, so every account uses the correct proxy: netsh winhttp set proxy proxy-server="http://proxy.x.y.z" - and you might need to run this to clear out your credential cache: certutil -urlcache * delete If your network guys end up grudgingly opening ports, they can restrict connections to the IP address range for your chosen Azure datacentre, which might make them happier - see Windows Azure Datacenter IP Ranges. After all that you've hopefully got an on-premise service listening in the cloud, which you can consume from pretty much any technology.

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• Building dynamic OLAP data marts on-the-fly

  - by DrJohn

  At the forthcoming SQLBits conference, I will be presenting a session on how to dynamically build an OLAP data mart on-the-fly. This blog entry is intended to clarify exactly what I mean by an OLAP data mart, why you may need to build them on-the-fly and finally outline the steps needed to build them dynamically. In subsequent blog entries, I will present exactly how to implement some of the techniques involved. What is an OLAP data mart? In data warehousing parlance, a data mart is a subset of the overall corporate data provided to business users to meet specific business needs. Of course, the term does not specify the technology involved, so I coined the term "OLAP data mart" to identify a subset of data which is delivered in the form of an OLAP cube which may be accompanied by the relational database upon which it was built. To clarify, the relational database is specifically create and loaded with the subset of data and then the OLAP cube is built and processed to make the data available to the end-users via standard OLAP client tools. Why build OLAP data marts? Market research companies sell data to their clients to make money. To gain competitive advantage, market research providers like to "add value" to their data by providing systems that enhance analytics, thereby allowing clients to make best use of the data. As such, OLAP cubes have become a standard way of delivering added value to clients. They can be built on-the-fly to hold specific data sets and meet particular needs and then hosted on a secure intranet site for remote access, or shipped to clients' own infrastructure for hosting. Even better, they support a wide range of different tools for analytical purposes, including the ever popular Microsoft Excel. Extension Attributes: The Challenge One of the key challenges in building multiple OLAP data marts based on the same 'template' is handling extension attributes. These are attributes that meet the client's specific reporting needs, but do not form part of the standard template. Now clearly, these extension attributes have to come into the system via additional files and ultimately be added to relational tables so they can end up in the OLAP cube. However, processing these files and filling dynamically altered tables with SSIS is a challenge as SSIS packages tend to break as soon as the database schema changes. There are two approaches to this: (1) dynamically build an SSIS package in memory to match the new database schema using C#, or (2) have the extension attributes provided as name/value pairs so the file's schema does not change and can easily be loaded using SSIS. The problem with the first approach is the complexity of writing an awful lot of complex C# code. The problem of the second approach is that name/value pairs are useless to an OLAP cube; so they have to be pivoted back into a proper relational table somewhere in the data load process WITHOUT breaking SSIS. How this can be done will be part of future blog entry. What is involved in building an OLAP data mart? There are a great many steps involved in building OLAP data marts on-the-fly. The key point is that all the steps must be automated to allow for the production of multiple OLAP data marts per day (i.e. many thousands, each with its own specific data set and attributes). Now most of these steps have a great deal in common with standard data warehouse practices. The key difference is that the databases are all built to order. The only permanent database is the metadata database (shown in orange) which holds all the metadata needed to build everything else (i.e. client orders, configuration information, connection strings, client specific requirements and attributes etc.). The staging database (shown in red) has a short life: it is built, populated and then ripped down as soon as the OLAP Data Mart has been populated. In the diagram below, the OLAP data mart comprises the two blue components: the Data Mart which is a relational database and the OLAP Cube which is an OLAP database implemented using Microsoft Analysis Services (SSAS). The client may receive just the OLAP cube or both components together depending on their reporting requirements.  So, in broad terms the steps required to fulfil a client order are as follows: Step 1: Prepare metadata Create a set of database names unique to the client's order Modify all package connection strings to be used by SSIS to point to new databases and file locations. Step 2: Create relational databases Create the staging and data mart relational databases using dynamic SQL and set the database recovery mode to SIMPLE as we do not need the overhead of logging anything Execute SQL scripts to build all database objects (tables, views, functions and stored procedures) in the two databases Step 3: Load staging database Use SSIS to load all data files into the staging database in a parallel operation Load extension files containing name/value pairs. These will provide client-specific attributes in the OLAP cube. Step 4: Load data mart relational database Load the data from staging into the data mart relational database, again in parallel where possible Allocate surrogate keys and use SSIS to perform surrogate key lookup during the load of fact tables Step 5: Load extension tables & attributes Pivot the extension attributes from their native name/value pairs into proper relational tables Add the extension attributes to the views used by OLAP cube Step 6: Deploy & Process OLAP cube Deploy the OLAP database directly to the server using a C# script task in SSIS Modify the connection string used by the OLAP cube to point to the data mart relational database Modify the cube structure to add the extension attributes to both the data source view and the relevant dimensions Remove any standard attributes that not required Process the OLAP cube Step 7: Backup and drop databases Drop staging database as it is no longer required Backup data mart relational and OLAP database and ship these to the client's infrastructure Drop data mart relational and OLAP database from the build server Mark order complete Start processing the next order, ad infinitum. So my future blog posts and my forthcoming session at the SQLBits conference will all focus on some of the more interesting aspects of building OLAP data marts on-the-fly such as handling the load of extension attributes and how to dynamically alter the structure of an OLAP cube using C#.

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• Inheritance Mapping Strategies with Entity Framework Code First CTP5: Part 2 – Table per Type (TPT)

  - by mortezam

  In the previous blog post you saw that there are three different approaches to representing an inheritance hierarchy and I explained Table per Hierarchy (TPH) as the default mapping strategy in EF Code First. We argued that the disadvantages of TPH may be too serious for our design since it results in denormalized schemas that can become a major burden in the long run. In today’s blog post we are going to learn about Table per Type (TPT) as another inheritance mapping strategy and we'll see that TPT doesn’t expose us to this problem. Table per Type (TPT)Table per Type is about representing inheritance relationships as relational foreign key associations. Every class/subclass that declares persistent properties—including abstract classes—has its own table. The table for subclasses contains columns only for each noninherited property (each property declared by the subclass itself) along with a primary key that is also a foreign key of the base class table. This approach is shown in the following figure: For example, if an instance of the CreditCard subclass is made persistent, the values of properties declared by the BillingDetail base class are persisted to a new row of the BillingDetails table. Only the values of properties declared by the subclass (i.e. CreditCard) are persisted to a new row of the CreditCards table. The two rows are linked together by their shared primary key value. Later, the subclass instance may be retrieved from the database by joining the subclass table with the base class table. TPT Advantages The primary advantage of this strategy is that the SQL schema is normalized. In addition, schema evolution is straightforward (modifying the base class or adding a new subclass is just a matter of modify/add one table). Integrity constraint definition are also straightforward (note how CardType in CreditCards table is now a non-nullable column). Another much more important advantage is the ability to handle polymorphic associations (a polymorphic association is an association to a base class, hence to all classes in the hierarchy with dynamic resolution of the concrete class at runtime). A polymorphic association to a particular subclass may be represented as a foreign key referencing the table of that particular subclass. Implement TPT in EF Code First We can create a TPT mapping simply by placing Table attribute on the subclasses to specify the mapped table name (Table attribute is a new data annotation and has been added to System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace in CTP5): public abstract class BillingDetail {     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }     public string Number { get; set; } } [Table("BankAccounts")] public class BankAccount : BillingDetail {     public string BankName { get; set; }     public string Swift { get; set; } } [Table("CreditCards")] public class CreditCard : BillingDetail {     public int CardType { get; set; }     public string ExpiryMonth { get; set; }     public string ExpiryYear { get; set; } } public class InheritanceMappingContext : DbContext {     public DbSet<BillingDetail> BillingDetails { get; set; } } If you prefer fluent API, then you can create a TPT mapping by using ToTable() method: protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder) {     modelBuilder.Entity<BankAccount>().ToTable("BankAccounts");     modelBuilder.Entity<CreditCard>().ToTable("CreditCards"); } Generated SQL For QueriesLet’s take an example of a simple non-polymorphic query that returns a list of all the BankAccounts: var query = from b in context.BillingDetails.OfType<BankAccount>() select b; Executing this query (by invoking ToList() method) results in the following SQL statements being sent to the database (on the bottom, you can also see the result of executing the generated query in SQL Server Management Studio): Now, let’s take an example of a very simple polymorphic query that requests all the BillingDetails which includes both BankAccount and CreditCard types: projects some properties out of the base class BillingDetail, without querying for anything from any of the subclasses: var query = from b in context.BillingDetails             select new { b.BillingDetailId, b.Number, b.Owner }; -- var query = from b in context.BillingDetails select b; This LINQ query seems even more simple than the previous one but the resulting SQL query is not as simple as you might expect: -- As you can see, EF Code First relies on an INNER JOIN to detect the existence (or absence) of rows in the subclass tables CreditCards and BankAccounts so it can determine the concrete subclass for a particular row of the BillingDetails table. Also the SQL CASE statements that you see in the beginning of the query is just to ensure columns that are irrelevant for a particular row have NULL values in the returning flattened table. (e.g. BankName for a row that represents a CreditCard type) TPT ConsiderationsEven though this mapping strategy is deceptively simple, the experience shows that performance can be unacceptable for complex class hierarchies because queries always require a join across many tables. In addition, this mapping strategy is more difficult to implement by hand— even ad-hoc reporting is more complex. This is an important consideration if you plan to use handwritten SQL in your application (For ad hoc reporting, database views provide a way to offset the complexity of the TPT strategy. A view may be used to transform the table-per-type model into the much simpler table-per-hierarchy model.) SummaryIn this post we learned about Table per Type as the second inheritance mapping in our series. So far, the strategies we’ve discussed require extra consideration with regard to the SQL schema (e.g. in TPT, foreign keys are needed). This situation changes with the Table per Concrete Type (TPC) that we will discuss in the next post. References ADO.NET team blog Java Persistence with Hibernate book a { text-decoration: none; } a:visited { color: Blue; } .title { padding-bottom: 5px; font-family: Segoe UI; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: bold; padding-top: 15px; } .code, .typeName { font-family: consolas; } .typeName { color: #2b91af; } .padTop5 { padding-top: 5px; } .padTop10 { padding-top: 10px; } p.MsoNormal { margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11.0pt; font-family: "Calibri" , "sans-serif"; }

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• Quaternion Camera Orbiting around a Sphere

  - by jessejuicer

  Background: I'm trying to create a game where the camera is always rotating around a single sphere. I'm using the DirectX D3DX math functions in C++ on Windows. The Problem: I cannot get both the camera position and orientation both working properly at the same time. Either one works but not both together. Here's the code for my quaternion camera that revolves around a sphere, always looking at the centerpoint of the sphere, ... as far as I understand it (but which isn't working properly): (I'm only going to present rotation around the X axis here, to simplify this post) Whenever the UP key is pressed or held down, the camera should rotate around the X axis, while looking at the centerpoint of the sphere (which is at 0,0,0 in the world). So, I build a quaternion that represents a small angle of rotation around the x axis like this (where 'deltaAngle' is a small enough number for a slow rotation): D3DXVECTOR3 rotAxis; D3DXQUATERNION tempQuat; tempQuat.x = 0.0f; tempQuat.y = 0.0f; tempQuat.z = 0.0f; tempQuat.w = 1.0f; rotAxis.x = 1.0f; rotAxis.y = 0.0f; rotAxis.z = 0.0f; D3DXQuaternionRotationAxis(&tempQuat, &rotAxis, deltaAngle); ...and I accumulate the result into the camera's current orientation quat, like this: D3DXQuaternionMultiply(&cameraOrientationQuat, &cameraOrientationQuat, &tempQuat); ...which all works fine. Now I need to build a view matrix to pass to DirectX SetTransform function. So I build a rotation matrix from the camera orientation quat as follows: D3DXMATRIXA16 rotationMatrix; D3DXMatrixIdentity(&rotationMatrix); D3DXMatrixRotationQuaternion(&rotationMatrix, &cameraOrientationQuat); ...Now (as seen below) if I just transpose that rotationMatrix and plug it into the 3x3 section of the view matrix, then negate the camera's position and plug it into the translation section of the view matrix, the rotation magically works. Perfectly. (even when I add in rotations for all three axes). There's no gimbal lock, just a smooth rotation all around in any direction. BUT- this works even though I never change the camera's position. At all. Which sorta blows my mind. I even display the camera position and can watch it stay constant at it's starting point (0.0, 0.0, -4000.0). It never moves, but the rotation around the sphere is perfect. I don't understand that. For proper view rotation, the camera position should be revolving around the sphere. Here's the rest of building the view matrix (I'll talk about the commented code below). Note that the camera starts out at (0.0, 0.0, -4000.0) and m_camDistToTarget is 4000.0: /* D3DXVECTOR3 vec1; D3DXVECTOR4 vec2; vec1.x = 0.0f; vec1.y = 0.0f; vec1.z = -1.0f; D3DXVec3Transform(&vec2, &vec1, &rotationMatrix); g_cameraActor->pos.x = vec2.x * g_cameraActor->m_camDistToTarget; g_cameraActor->pos.y = vec2.y * g_cameraActor->m_camDistToTarget; g_cameraActor->pos.z = vec2.z * g_cameraActor->m_camDistToTarget; */ D3DXMatrixTranspose(&g_viewMatrix, &rotationMatrix); g_viewMatrix._41 = -g_cameraActor->pos.x; g_viewMatrix._42 = -g_cameraActor->pos.y; g_viewMatrix._43 = -g_cameraActor->pos.z; g_viewMatrix._44 = 1.0f; g_direct3DDevice9->SetTransform( D3DTS_VIEW, &g_viewMatrix ); ...(The world matrix is always an identity, and the perspective projection works fine). ...So, without the commented code being compiled, the rotation works fine. But to be proper, for obvious reasons, the camera position should be rotating around the sphere, which it currently is not. That's what the commented code is supposed to do. And when I add in that chunk of code to do that, and look at all the data as I hold the keys down (using UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT to rotate different directions) all the values look correct! The camera position is rotating around the sphere just fine, and I can watch that happen visually too. The problem is that the camera orientation does not lookat the center of the sphere. It always looks straight forward down the z axis (toward positive z) as it revolves around the sphere. Yet the values of both the rotation matrix and the view matrix seem to be behaving correctly. (The view matrix orientation is the same as the rotation matrix, just transposed). For instance if I just hold down the key to spin around the x axis, I can watch the values of the three axes represented in the view matrix (x, y, and z axes)... view x-axis stays at (1.0, 0.0, 0.0), and view y-axis and z-axis both spin around the x axis just fine. All the numbers are changing as they should be... well, almost. As far as I can tell, the position of the view matrix is spinning around the sphere one direction (like clockwise), and the orientation (the axes in the view matrix) are spinning the opposite direction (like counter-clockwise). Which I guess explains why the orientation appears to stay straight ahead. I know the position is correct. It revolves properly. It's the orientation that's wrong. Can anyone see what am I doing wrong? Am I using these functions incorrectly? Or is my algorithm flawed? As usual I've been combing my code for simple mistakes for many hours. I'm willing to post the actual code, and a video of the behavior, but that will take much more effort. Thought I'd ask this way first.

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• Christmas in the Clouds

  - by andrewbrust

  I have been spending the last 2 weeks immersing myself in a number of Windows Azure and SQL Azure technologies.  And in setting up a new business (I’ll speak more about that in the future), I have also become a customer of Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services).  In short, it has been a fortnight of Microsoft cloud computing. On the Azure side, I’ve looked, of course, at Web Roles and Worker Roles.  But I’ve also looked at Azure Storage’s REST API (including coding to it directly), I’ve looked at Azure Drive and the new VM Role; I’ve looked quite a bit at SQL Azure (including the project “Houston” Silverlight UI) and I’ve looked at SQL Azure labs’ OData service too. I’ve also looked at DataMarket and its integration with both PowerPivot and native Excel.  Then there’s AppFabric Caching, SQL Azure Reporting (what I could learn of it) and the Visual Studio tooling for Azure, including the storage of certificate-based credentials.  And to round it out with some user stuff, on the BPOS side, I’ve been working with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and LiveMeeting. I have to say I like a lot of what I’ve been seeing.  Azure’s not perfect, and BPOS certainly isn’t either.  But there’s good stuff in all these products, and there’s a lot of value. Azure Goes Deep Most people know that Web and Worker roles put the platform in charge of spinning virtual machines up and down, and keeping them up to date. But you can go way beyond that now.  The still-in-beta VM Role gives you the power to craft the machine (much as does Amazon’s EC2), though it takes away the platform’s self-managing attributes.  It still spins instances up and down, making drive storage non-durable, but Azure Drive gives you the ability to store VHD files as blobs and mount them as virtual hard drives that are readable and writeable.  Whether with Azure Storage or SQL Azure, Azure does data.  And OData is everywhere.  Azure Table Storage supports an OData Interface.  So does SQL Azure and so does DataMarket (the former project “Dallas”).  That means that Azure data repositories aren’t just straightforward to provision and configure…they’re also easy to program against, from just about any programming environment, in a RESTful manner.  And for more .NET-centric implementations, Azure AppFabric caching takes the technology formerly known as “Velocity” and throws it up into the cloud, speeding data access even more. Snapping in Place Once you get the hang of it, this stuff just starts to work in a way that becomes natural to understand.  I wasn’t expecting that, and I was really happy to discover it. In retrospect, I am not surprised, because I think the various Azure teams are the center of gravity for Redmond’s innovation right now.  The products belie this and so do my observations of the product teams’ motivation and high morale.  It is really good to see this; Microsoft needs to lead somewhere, and they need to be seen as the underdog while doing so.  With Azure, both requirements are in place.   BPOS: Bad Acronym, Easy Setup BPOS is about products you already know; Exchange, SharePoint, Live Meeting and Office Communications Server.  As such, it’s hard not to be underwhelmed by BPOS.  Until you realize how easy it makes it to get all that stuff set up.  I would say that from sign-up to productive use took me about 45 minutes…and that included the time necessary to wrestle with my DNS provider, set up Outlook and my SmartPhone up to talk to the Exchange account, create my SharePoint site collection, and configure the Outlook Conferencing add-in to talk to the provisioned Live Meeting account. Never before did I think setting up my own Exchange mail could come anywhere close to the simplicity of setting up an SMTP/POP account, and yet BPOS actually made it faster.   What I want from my Azure Christmas Next Year Not everything about Microsoft’s cloud is good.  I close this post with a list of things I’d like to see addressed: BPOS offerings are still based on the 2007 Wave of Microsoft server technologies.  We need to get to 2010, and fast.  Arguably, the 2010 products should have been released to the off-premises channel before the on-premise sone.  Office 365 can’t come fast enough. Azure’s Internet tooling and domain naming, is scattered and confusing.  Deployed ASP.NET applications go to cloudapp.net; SQL Azure and Azure storage work off windows.net.  The Azure portal and Project Houston are at azure.com.  Then there’s appfabriclabs.com and sqlazurelabs.com.  There is a new Silverlight portal that replaces most, but not all of the HTML ones.  And Project Houston is Silvelright-based too, though separate from the Silverlight portal tooling. Microsoft is the king off tooling.  They should not make me keep an entire OneNote notebook full of portal links, account names, access keys, assemblies and namespaces and do so much CTRL-C/CTRL-V work.  I’d like to see more project templates, have them automatically reference the appropriate assemblies, generate the right using/Imports statements and prime my config files with the right markup.  Then I want a UI that lets me log in with my Live ID and pick the appropriate project, database, namespace and key string to get set up fast. Beta programs, if they’re open, should onboard me quickly.  I know the process is difficult and everyone’s going as fast as they can.  But I don’t know why it’s so difficult or why it takes so long.  Getting developers up to speed on new features quickly helps popularize the platform.  Make this a priority. Make Azure accessible from the simplicity platforms, i.e. ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) and LightSwitch.  Support .NET 4 now.  Make WebMatrix, IIS Express and SQL Compact work with the Azure development fabric. Have HTML helpers make Azure programming easier.  Have LightSwitch work with SQL Azure and not require SQL Express.  LightSwitch has some promising Azure integration now.  But we need more.  WebMatrix has none and that’s just silly, now that the Extra Small Instance is being introduced. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit is great.  But I want Microsoft to make it even better and I want them to evangelize it much more aggressively.  There’s a lot of good material on Azure development out there, but it’s scattered in the same way that the platform is.   The Training Kit ties a lot of disparate stuff together nicely.  Make it known. Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot All in all, diving deep into Azure was a good way to end the year.  Diving deeper into Azure should a great way to spend next year, not just for me, but for Microsoft too.

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• Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 3: Anonymous partial-trust consumer

  - by Elton Stoneman

  This is the third in the IPASBR series, see also: Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 2: Anonymous full-trust .NET consumer As the patterns get further from the simple .NET full-trust consumer, all that changes is the communication protocol and the authentication mechanism. In Part 3 the scenario is that we still have a secure .NET environment consuming our service, so we can store shared keys securely, but the runtime environment is locked down so we can't use Microsoft.ServiceBus to get the nice WCF relay bindings. To support this we will expose a RESTful endpoint through the Azure Service Bus, and require the consumer to send a security token with each HTTP service request. Pattern applicability This is a good fit for scenarios where: the runtime environment is secure enough to keep shared secrets the consumer can execute custom code, including building HTTP requests with custom headers the consumer cannot use the Azure SDK assemblies the service may need to know who is consuming it the service does not need to know who the end-user is Note there isn't actually a .NET requirement here. By exposing the service in a REST endpoint, anything that can talk HTTP can be a consumer. We'll authenticate through ACS which also gives us REST endpoints, so the service is still accessed securely. Our real-world example would be a hosted cloud app, where we we have enough room in the app's customisation to keep the shared secret somewhere safe and to hook in some HTTP calls. We will be flowing an identity through to the on-premise service now, but it will be the service identity given to the consuming app - the end user's identity isn't flown through yet. In this post, we’ll consume the service from Part 1 in ASP.NET using the WebHttpRelayBinding. The code for Part 3 (+ Part 1) is on GitHub here: IPASBR Part 3. Authenticating and authorizing with ACS We'll follow the previous examples and add a new service identity for the namespace in ACS, so we can separate permissions for different consumers (see walkthrough in Part 1). I've named the identity partialTrustConsumer. We’ll be authenticating against ACS with an explicit HTTP call, so we need a password credential rather than a symmetric key – for a nice secure option, generate a symmetric key, copy to the clipboard, then change type to password and paste in the key: We then need to do the same as in Part 2 , add a rule to map the incoming identity claim to an outgoing authorization claim that allows the identity to send messages to Service Bus: Issuer: Access Control Service Input claim type: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier Input claim value: partialTrustConsumer Output claim type: net.windows.servicebus.action Output claim value: Send As with Part 2, this sets up a service identity which can send messages into Service Bus, but cannot register itself as a listener, or manage the namespace. RESTfully exposing the on-premise service through Azure Service Bus Relay The part 3 sample code is ready to go, just put your Azure details into Solution Items\AzureConnectionDetails.xml and “Run Custom Tool” on the .tt files.  But to do it yourself is very simple. We already have a WebGet attribute in the service for locally making REST calls, so we are just going to add a new endpoint which uses the WebHttpRelayBinding to relay that service through Azure. It's as easy as adding this endpoint to Web.config for the service:         <endpoint address="https://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/rest"                   binding="webHttpRelayBinding"                    contract="Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services.IFormatService"                   behaviorConfiguration="SharedSecret">         </endpoint> - and adding the webHttp attribute in your endpoint behavior:           <behavior name="SharedSecret">             <webHttp/>             <transportClientEndpointBehavior credentialType="SharedSecret">               <clientCredentials>                 <sharedSecret issuerName="serviceProvider"                               issuerSecret="gl0xaVmlebKKJUAnpripKhr8YnLf9Neaf6LR53N8uGs="/>               </clientCredentials>             </transportClientEndpointBehavior>           </behavior> Where's my WSDL? The metadata story for REST is a bit less automated. In our local webHttp endpoint we've enabled WCF's built-in help, so if you navigate to: http://localhost/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services/FormatService.svc/rest/help - you'll see the uri format for making a GET request to the service. The format is the same over Azure, so this is where you'll be connecting: https://[your-namespace].servicebus.windows.net/rest/reverse?string=abc123 Build the service with the new endpoint, open that in a browser and you'll get an XML version of an HTTP status code - a 401 with an error message stating that you haven’t provided an authorization header: <?xml version="1.0"?><Error><Code>401</Code><Detail>MissingToken: The request contains no authorization header..TrackingId:4cb53408-646b-4163-87b9-bc2b20cdfb75_5,TimeStamp:10/3/2012 8:34:07 PM</Detail></Error> By default, the setup of your Service Bus endpoint as a relying party in ACS expects a Simple Web Token to be presented with each service request, and in the browser we're not passing one, so we can't access the service. Note that this request doesn't get anywhere near your on-premise service, Service Bus only relays requests once they've got the necessary approval from ACS. Why didn't the consumer need to get ACS authorization in Part 2? It did, but it was all done behind the scenes in the NetTcpRelayBinding. By specifying our Shared Secret credentials in the consumer, the service call is preceded by a check on ACS to see that the identity provided is a) valid, and b) allowed access to our Service Bus endpoint. By making manual HTTP requests, we need to take care of that ACS check ourselves now. We do that with a simple WebClient call to the ACS endpoint of our service; passing the shared secret credentials, we will get back an SWT: var values = new System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection(); values.Add("wrap_name", "partialTrustConsumer"); //service identity name values.Add("wrap_password", "suCei7AzdXY9toVH+S47C4TVyXO/UUFzu0zZiSCp64Y="); //service identity password values.Add("wrap_scope", "http://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/"); //this is the realm of the RP in ACS var acsClient = new WebClient(); var responseBytes = acsClient.UploadValues("https://sixeyed-ipasbr-sb.accesscontrol.windows.net/WRAPv0.9/", "POST", values); rawToken = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(responseBytes); With a little manipulation, we then attach the SWT to subsequent REST calls in the authorization header; the token contains the Send claim returned from ACS, so we will be authorized to send messages into Service Bus. Running the sample Navigate to http://localhost:2028/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.WebHttpClient/Default.cshtml, enter a string and hit Go! - your string will be reversed by your on-premise service, routed through Azure: Using shared secret client credentials in this way means ACS is the identity provider for your service, and the claim which allows Send access to Service Bus is consumed by Service Bus. None of the authentication details make it through to your service, so your service is not aware who the consumer is (MSDN calls this "anonymous authentication").

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